Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. The Six Properties
     … It’s doing right concentration, starting with right mindfulness and then, as mindfulness gets established, it turns into right concentration. It’s all one practice. So work with your perceptions so that they’re continuous and you have the sense as you’re tuning into different levels of your experience, different levels of reality here, the same way that you tune into different stations … 
  3. Breath, Tranquility, & Insight
     … Releasing, here, can mean anything from simply releasing it from unskillful thoughts all the way to releasing it from the factors present in lower levels of concentration to bring it to very subtle states of concentration. The things that are weighing the mind down: What can you do to let go of them? The things that are getting in the way of settling down … 
  4. Commit, Reflect, Discern
     … So he realized the best thing to do was to get his mind into concentration. Again: commitment, reflection, and then acting on your reflection. When you get the mind into concentration, it’s the same sort of thing. Get it to settle down, then do what’s needed to keep it there. You have to see what works and what doesn’t work. The … 
  5. A Warrior’s Strengths
     … From that, you build your other strengths, particularly concentration, because concentration is a really good protection to have. It’s a good place to hide out when you need it. Like that story of the martial arts expert: His students tried all their different skills on a donkey that was by the side of the road. The first student gets kicked across the road … 
  6. Joyous Endurance
     … So right now we’re trying to create a state of concentration in the mind. Direct your thoughts to the breath, part of the body in and of itself. Be ardent, alert, mindful. Put aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s the basic formula. That’s how you get into concentration, where the mind can settle in but still maintain … 
  7. An Auspicious Birth
     … It needs the strength that comes from all the factors of the path, everything from right view down to right mindfulness and right concentration. So you try to develop these things. It’s not the case that, when a moment of mindfulness comes you say, “Here it comes, there it goes,” or a moment of concentration comes, “Here it comes, there it goes.” You … 
  8. What Are You Doing Right Now?
     … This is what concentration practice is all about. As you get more familiar with it, you begin to see that you’re also learning things about the whole process of intention. How does it happen? On the one hand, you begin to see other intentions coming in, but for the time being, you want to resist them. Such as the intention to think about … 
  9. Ardency
     … In other words, you want to see it clearly until you develop a sense of dispassion for the stress you add to things, so that you can focus on the effort to keep track of the breath, to be more and more consistent in following the breath, to strengthen your concentration, to strengthen your focus. Those are the primary things you focus on: either … 
  10. Becoming
     … After a while of practicing concentration, he complained to Ajaan Lee, “As we bring the mind to concentration like this, aren’t we developing states of becoming and birth?” Bhava and jati are the words he used. You may have noticed as we were chanting the Sutta on Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion just now: The craving that leads to further becoming … 
  11. Wisdom Requires Integrity
     … We’re talking about being disturbed by perceptions in your mind, and in particular by the perceptions or activities that are an integral part of that stage of concentration. This means that, to get past that disturbance, you’re going to have to let go of that perception to move to a deeper stage of concentration . As in the instructions to Rahula, you’re … 
  12. How to Listen
     … Now, ekaggatā—the noun version of that—is a definition of concentration. So you concentrate on the talk and try to bring your mind to stillness. You find pleasure in the stillness and you learn to appreciate it. It’s sad that of all the factors of the path, right concentration is the one that gets dropped most often. People say, “It’s too … 
  13. Looking for Trouble
     … In most of the standard texts, it’s listed as a prerequisite for gaining concentration. You learn how to create a space in your mind even when your eyes are not closed and there are other things coming in through your eyes, your ears, your nose, your tongue, sensations coming in from the body. You want to learn that when these things are coming … 
  14. Talking to Yourself
     … In the same way, the strength of concentration comes, not from forcing, but from giving the mind a good place to stay. Learn how to be with the breath, be with the body, be with your mind in the present moment. Give the mind good reasons for why it wants to stay here, why it enjoys to stay here. That way, the concentration becomes … 
  15. A Better Place to Feed
     … Then you find that not only distractions and pains are a threat to your concentration—but even the pleasure of the concentration itself can become a threat as you lose your focus on the breath and start focusing on the pleasure. So you’ve got to resist that. Let the pleasure do its own work—you don’t have to exclaim over it; you … 
  16. To Take Danger in Stride
     … Virtue, concentration, and discernment are basically survival skills. Attitudes of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, learning how to develop those in all situations where they’re needed: Those are survival skills, too. As a famous philosopher once said, we live forward but understand backward. We’re going to live in the world and we’re going to have to make choices about what to … 
  17. The Karma Snake
     … What are you doing right now? Is it skillful? What will its results be? What can you do to make sure that you get better and better at your skill? For instance, as you’re staying with the breath, how you can get more stably concentrated, and more reliably concentrated, and not get worked up about the things that eat away at your concentration … 
  18. Non-Verbal Discernment
    Non-Verbal Discernment September 11, 2021 There’s a passage where the Buddha says that if you want to master jhana and get really good at right concentration, you need both tranquility and insight. In other words, you don’t just force the mind down. If you want the mind to be willing to settle down, you have to understand its causes and effects … 
  19. The Psychology of Virtue
     … Then you take that basic principle and you trace it all the way through, developing concentration, developing discernment, getting more and more precise in and having a sense of what the choices are. In terms of the precepts, it’s simply the choice between acting on an intention and not acting on it. In terms of concentration, it’s staying with that original intention … 
  20. Think
     … a sixfold path of right mindfulness, without right effort and right concentration, and a sevenfold path of right effort and right concentration but without right mindfulness. Yet that doesn’t make any sense. You have to go back and see where the modern definitions are wrong. Actually, mindfulness is not an open accepting state of mind. Mindfulness has its agendas. You’re trying to … 
  21. Evaluating the Practice
    Ajaan Lee had a lot of really helpful observations on concentration practice. The first had to do with the factors of the first jhana: that directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation are the causes. Those are the things you do. When you do them well, they give rise to the other two factors: pleasure and a sense of fullness, rapture. It’s all … 
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