Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. Cutting New Paths in the Mind
     … Remember those questions that he said don’t deserve asking, or don’t deserve attention: “Who am I? What am I? Am I good? Am I bad?” Get the question of identity out of the way, and simply look at, “What kind of habit is this? Is this a useful habit? Do I really want it?” You may know very well that you don … 
  3. A Goal Without Limits
     … It’s based on a perception, the perception infinite consciousness, and it’s maintained by acts of attention and intention. So when the Buddha says that there’s no name or form in anidassana consciousness, he’s talking about nibbāna, because that’s where there’s no experience of name and form. Consciousness without surface is a type of consciousness but it’s not … 
  4. Perfect Breathing Isn’t the Goal
     … You’re going to see a lot of things you don’t like, and there is that tendency to deflect your attention away from those things. But those are precisely the things you’ve got to understand. The Buddha gives you his five-step process: look for the origination, look for the passing away, look for the allure, look for the drawbacks. Compare the … 
  5. True for What Purpose?
     … now that the body is going to start falling apart, where are you going to focus your attention so that you don’t create unnecessary suffering for yourself? Here again, the four noble truths provide the grammar. They provide the structure, allowing you to organize your sense of what’s important, what’s not important, where your priorities are. Anything that fits into that … 
  6. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … You can keep the rest of the meeting on topic, and you find that the crazy person thinking off in the corner, if you don’t pay attention to it, you’re not feeding it, begins to die out after a while, because there’s no one listening. So even though there may be some background chatter in the mind, remind yourself that the … 
  7. The Dhamma Eye
     … And although we shouldn’t focus too much attention on where we’re going—we should focus on what our next step will be— still, hearing about it gives us an idea that this is a good direction to go: something that’s totally free. Total freedom, total happiness, totally harmless. We think about that as a possibility, then we look at our other … 
  8. Respect for the Triple Training
     … You’re not really paying attention. Or laziness: You don’t want to be bothered. But you’ve given in to these three habits for a long time. That’s a triple training you don’t want to get involved with—you don’t want to submit to. You’ve submitted to it long enough. By submitting to virtue, the practice of concentration, and … 
  9. Brahmaviharas at the Breath
     … If there are pains in your knees, pains in your hips, you don’t make that the focus of your attention. You focus on the parts that are comfortable. You remind yourself, after all, that those knees and those hips are not really yours. You have the choice as to whether or not you want to lay claim to the pain in those knees … 
  10. A Seeker’s Habits
     … And that begins to focus your attention on what’s really important in your life: the intentions that shape what you do. Because what you intend to do then in turn shapes your experiences. If you’re not skillful, it can go into a downward spiral. So you have to take a good look at your life to see which parts of your life … 
  11. Four Roles to Play
     … Where do you feel it? Then you focus your attention to where it’s clearest. The next question is: How does it feel? Does it feel good? You can try experimenting. Tell yourself to try long breathing for a while, then to try short breathing. Fast or slow, heavy or light. Deep, shallow. Broad, narrow. This is where you bring in another aspect of … 
  12. Minding Your Own Business
     … You begin to see that even the simple process of breathing can get all screwed up if you don’t pay it any attention. What you’re here trying to do is to sort out which ways of breathing feel good for the whole body. You take it section-by-section first: Breathe in a way that feels good for this section, then move … 
  13. Dissolving Your Thoughts
     … In other words, you give all your attention to the breath energies in the body. Try to connect them as much as possible when they’re positive, and as the breath energy feels more and more full, there will naturally be less of a need to breathe in and out. The breath gets softer and more gentle, and when everything is really well connected … 
  14. The Knife of Discernment
     … Just make sure that you’ve got the causes right in terms of the stability of your gaze, the sense of wellbeing you can fall back on whenever you need it, and the quality of appropriate attention — learning how to ask the right questions. That’s what you do in the meditation, that’s what you intend in the meditation, and when these things … 
  15. The Anatomy of the Present
     … Sensory contact is where we tend to locate the present moment, but the Buddha is saying that this aspect of the present moment is shaped by a lot of factors that go prior to it in the present, including the factors and sub-factors of fabrication, intention, and attention. These are the things that prime you either to suffer or not to suffer from … 
  16. The Cool Fire of Jhana
     … Once it’s settled in, you don’t have to be quite so attentive to it. You still have to tend to it. But you can actually allow other thoughts to come in—not that you’re going to go with them, but you’re beginning to see the process of how a thought forms. There’s room for that. At the same time … 
  17. A Blameless Happiness
     … be better off if you could let go of some of that attachment? What is your perception of the body? What is your perception of the pain? How are you paying attention to it? Are you thinking, “Why is this pain here? Why is it harming me?” How about changing the question to, “How can I understand this pain?” You just change the question … 
  18. Raise Your Standards
     … These movements of attention, now focusing here, now focusing there: Ask yourself, what caused you to change focus? When you frame things to yourself, what are the terms you use to frame them? You encounter this immediately when you’re working with the breath. You start out with the assumption that the breath is the air coming in through the nose, but as you … 
  19. De-thinking
     … There’s the desire, the interest, the persistence as you keep after it, the close attention you’re paying to it, and then the ingenuity you’re putting into the questions you ask. All these things contribute to concentration, help the concentration get settled, get solid, get very clear. It’s this ability to ask questions that makes all the difference in your practice … 
  20. Action & Result
     … He teaches you where to focus your attention, say, on the body in itself, the breath in itself, and how to develop powers of mindfulness and concentration around that. When the mind gets well-fed with the concentration, clear with the concentration, then you start asking the right questions. And again, these are questions of action and result—the kinds of questions the Buddha … 
  21. Strength of Conviction: 2
     … In that case, who you believe would be people of integrity; what you believe is the true Dhamma; what you do as a result is that you develop appropriate attention and you practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. Now there’s another list of stream-entry factors: These are the factors of stream-entry or that constitute what it means to obtain … 
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