Search results for: "Focusing"

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  2. Good Friends Inside
     … These are just as important in the meditation as your ability to stay focused for long periods of time: things like your ability to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and just keep on going, finding ways to energize yourself. This is how tasks get done. This is how progress gets made. This is how people really make a change in themselves: by believing … 
  3. Questioning Your Unconscious Actions
     … To see them, you have to get the mind really quiet and have it focused in the right places—and ask the right questions. When we think about subconscious acts, we usually think about the subconscious or the unconscious, or as things “in my subconscious,” as if it were a room in the mind, like the basement, whereas we’re up here above, in … 
  4. Pissing on Palaces
     … Just that much right there helps tune us in, because it focuses on the point that our actions are the important things in the world. What we’re doing right here, right now: That’s the most important thing—which is very different from the message that we get from everybody else. The news presented by the media is about what somebody else is … 
  5. Square One
     … From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.” This is called “this/that conditionality” because it’s focused on things you see immediately in your present experience. We’re not looking for causes behind what you can see. We’re looking for things you can actually observe. You want to see patterns there. We’re going to be observing our mind right … 
  6. Preparing to Die Well
     … There’s the gross level, which is what you’re focused on, but there are more subtle levels you can tune-in to, like tuning from a radio station playing rock music to one that’s playing something very quiet, peaceful, and soothing. So even though the waves of the rock station are still here in the air, you’re not focusing on them … 
  7. Faith in Goodness
     … The Buddha focuses on the brahmaviharas, and particularly the brahmavihara of goodwill. But goodwill includes compassion and empathetic joy. You see people who are suffering, or who are creating the causes for suffering, and you don’t just leave them and say, “Well, they deserve to suffer.” You have compassion: May they find some way of ending their suffering. If there’s anything that … 
  8. The Grass at the Gate
     … The focusing on the sensation here is directed thought. Watching over it, protecting it, is evaluation. Staying consistently with the relaxed sensation is singleness of preoccupation. And in that relaxed sensation there’s the potential both for ease and for rapture to develop. So you’ve got the potential for all five factors of the first jhana. They tend to grow stronger if they … 
  9. Quality
     … Keep things focused right here. As for everything else, just leave it as uncertain, unknowable. Or even it is knowable, you just don’t know for the time being. So let it be. Let it be. If you try to take on too many things all at once, think of Ajaan Lee’s analogy of starting an orchard. You’ve got a large piece … 
  10. Bless Yourself
     … So you can stay focused right here. Your mind takes on so much work in the course of the day—dealing with this person, that person, this duty, that duty, this job—and the body has its needs, or your emotions come up and you have to deal with them: so many different things the mind has to deal with. It’s good to … 
  11. Clinging-Aggregates in Context
     … You’re focused on the breath. That’s part of form. You’re trying to create a feeling of pleasure. To stay focused requires a perception, a mental image of the breath that you keep in mind. And then you talk to yourself about how well it’s working, trying to get the mind to fit snugly with the breath: That’s fabrication. Then … 
  12. The Battle of Your Selves
    We sit here trying to get the mind into concentration, to get it focused on the breath, and all of a sudden we find it someplace else. By that I mean without any sense that we intended to go someplace else, it’s just that we’re there. This is a good lesson in how your self is pretty arbitrary, and how there are … 
  13. The Lightning Bolt
     … The issue is that you keep at it, that you don’t let yourself get discouraged, and that you try to create the right conditions, both inside and out, for focusing on training the mind as your top priority. In the texts they talk about four factors for gaining your first taste of the deathless. One is trying to find a person of integrity … 
  14. The Practice of Right View
     … The talk is to help keep you focused here and to give you some perspective on what you’re supposed to be looking for, what you’re supposed to be doing. Last year I received a phone call from someone who was doing a thesis on using Buddhist teachings and practices in the workplace. He wanted to ask me some questions as part of … 
  15. Taking Initiative
    There’s a passage where the Buddha talks about how to find happiness in this lifetime, and it focuses on your activities outside. But as is often the case, when the Buddha is talking about things outside, he’s also talking about things inside as well. So it’s good to listen to this lesson and see what you can bring into your meditation … 
  16. The Constancy of the Body
     … After all, he emphasizes that we should see things as inconstant and stressful and not-self, and here it seems like we’re focusing on making the mind constant so it has a sense of ease and that it’s under our control. And that’s true. But only when you develop the mind in this direction will you begin to see the really … 
  17. Choosing Your Allies
     … So this questions focuses on the fact that your actions are really important in shaping your life and that you have the freedom to choose your actions, so you want to make the most of that freedom of choice. Wisdom is not simply accepting, “Well, things come and go and I guess I’ve got to be okay with that.” The Buddha’s saying … 
  18. A Good Buddhist Ego
     … Even in the passages where the Buddha talks about the importance of focusing on the present moment, it’s in the context of death contemplation, reminding you that you’ve got to prepare for death. There’s one where he says you put aside thoughts of the past, thoughts of the future, concerns for the future, and you focus on what’s arising in … 
  19. The Power of Intention
     … The question came up yesterday, How is it possible that people can have evil intentions and still get the mind into concentration? Well, it’s possible with all kinds of intentions to get the mind focused, but if you want your concentration to lead to awakening—in other words, you want it to be honest and really conducive to true happiness, i.e., right … 
  20. Duties in the Present
     … developing mindfulness by staying focused on the breath. At the same time, as you get more and more clear about having a consistent intention in the mind, this develops discernment. Discernment is focused on understanding the most important part of the present moment, which is the intention that’s shaping how you experience things right now. When you’re meditating, you’re setting a … 
  21. The Uses of Concentration
     … It’s like that book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which teaches how to draw a face by focusing not on the eyes or the nose or the mouth, but on the space between the eyes and the mouth, or between the eyes and the nose. In other words, look at the shapes you ordinarily don’t look at, and you … 
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