Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Undividing the Mind
     … That narrows your attention down to what you’re doing right now. As one of the contemplations adds: We’re heirs to our actions; whatever good or evil we’re going to meet with in life come from our actions. Where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. So you really do want to train the mind. The positive contemplations are … 
  3. Tap, Tap, Tap
     … As the Buddha pointed out in Majjhima 2, there are lots of questions that you could ask that are inappropriate and they’re not even worth your attention. When you look at the list, you can see that many of them are the kinds of questions you would be tempted to ask if you had knowledge of this sort: “What was I in the … 
  4. Looking Inward
     … The reason there doesn’t seem to be very much here is because we haven’t really paid attention here. We’ve been distracted by things outside. But now that we turn around and look inwardly—look inward consistently—we find there are lots of subtle things going on here, things that you can master, areas where you really can make a difference—where … 
  5. All Your Old Baggage
     … And you find that as you get more and more engrossed in the idea of choosing the right way of breathing right now, right now, right now, all the baggage you’ve been carrying in from the past gradually gets put aside as more and more of your attention, more and more of your alertness gets applied to the present moment. So there is … 
  6. “My Way”
     … Keep your attention focused there more than outside. Our media nowadays tend to focus on everything outside. We almost live in the screens of our hand-held devices or our computers or whatever. And the important people seem to be the ones who are in the screens. But they’re not. The important person is the person holding the screen. What is this person … 
  7. Go in Brightness
     … You put it into practice first by applying appropriate attention, asking, “How does this teaching apply to my problem of suffering right now? How do I identify where my suffering is, what I’m doing to cause it, and how does this teaching give me some insights into how I can develop a path that brings that suffering to an end by bringing the … 
  8. Two Hands Washing
     … When the Buddha talked about appropriate attention, he defined it in terms of the four noble truths. Learning to see where the stress is, where’s the cause, where’s the cessation of stress, and what you’re doing to help the stress stop. The questions should be aimed in that direction. And you use those standards to judge the answers, the results that … 
  9. Chanting on Your Own
     … In the beginning, of course, I paid most attention to “Method 2.” It wasn’t long, though, before he asked me to memorize The Divine Mantra. He said it would help with my meditation. As you know, it’s a chant on the qualities of the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, relating them to the six properties, the six dhātu. I found that … 
  10. Just Rightness
     … Right view, one, focuses your attention on the whole issue of karma: your actions and their results. Then, two, on its more refined level, it points out the issue of suffering, seeing things in terms of four noble truths, which means you don’t see them in terms of what you want or what you don’t want. That’s in the background: You … 
  11. Cutting Edge Perceptions
     … And the more careful attention you pay to it right here, right now, the more you’re going to notice. For example, if you have any subconscious ideas that a comfortable breath or a good meditative breath has to be long and slow, you might ask yourself, “Is that what you need right now? What does the body need right now? What does the … 
  12. The Power of Intention
     … Something in the thought captures your imagination, captures your attention, and you build a whole world around it. Then you go into that world, and at that point you’re separated from the world of the body. But if you can see the initial stirring as simply a stirring and then breathe right through it, that can be your game: zapping the thoughts before … 
  13. Balance & Release
     … Ajaan Fuang once said, “You have to be really crazy about this to do it well.” Otherwise, you might not be paying close attention when things seem to be going okay, and then “okay” begins to get a little loose, shaky, wobbly. That’s when you have to heighten your level of involvement and focus. To get very involved in an activity, whether it … 
  14. When You Hit a Plateau
     … But if you’d stopped and paid attention, you could see more. In the same way, there’s a lot to see here in your body and mind. After all, what’s happening right now to shape your experience? There’s bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, the images you hold in mind … 
  15. Mindfulness of Death
    When the Buddha talks about the importance of being attentive and alert in the present moment, it’s usually in the context of mindfulness of death—the message being that you don’t know when death is going to come, but you do know there are duties you have to do in the present moment in order to prepare. This is why mindfulness of … 
  16. Breath Energies
     … You also notice that the more subtle your attention, the more subtle your awareness, the more the sense of well-being that comes from the breath and the pleasure that comes from the breath seeping into areas that used to be hardened inside. The fact that we’ve ignored this part of our awareness for so long allows us to treat it pretty poorly … 
  17. Boxed Stories
     … When you’re with the breath, the fact that you’re attentive to the breath and alert to the breath creates a feeling of pleasure. When you’re with the breath, you’re mindful. The mind is getting a little bit more steady. That’s a quality of the mind. There are also the mental qualities of equanimity or concentration, or whatever good mental … 
  18. Maintenance Work
     … He says that your intentions will make a big difference in the mind if you pay attention to them, if you stick with them. So you’ve got to test that principle. The fact of intention becomes more and more helpful the more harmless you can make it. Can you do that? Well, you’ve got to stick with it if you want to … 
  19. Respect for Concentration
     … Don’t pay attention to anything else, even the voice of the talk here. Let that be in the background. These activities are called aggregates, and ordinarily we suffer a lot because of the aggregates. But it was the Buddha’s insight as a strategist to see that we can take these aggregates and learn how to engage in them skillfully, because aggregates are … 
  20. Dhamma Survivalism
     … Regular survivalists have stocks of food, weapons, whatnot, not realizing that by having lots of food stocked away, if they’re not generous with it when bad times come, then it’s going to be something that will attract the attention of the neighbors—and not in a friendly way. So there’s a danger even with having a stockpile of food. But there … 
  21. Passion for Nostalgia
     … There has to be an act of attention and intention to keep them going, and the intention has to be fed by the allure. But you have to realize that this is all suffering. You’re clinging to these different aggregates. And what are you getting out of them? You’re placing ruts in the mind, or as the Buddha would say, you’re … 
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