Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. The Gatekeeper Doesn’t Just Note
     … They’re basically—and this is where the analogy breaks down—they’re basically the Buddha’s instructions for how to get the mind into concentration. For example, you stay with the breath, in and of itself. You’re ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That’s what we’re doing as we’re concentrating: staying … 
  3. Fear of Death
     … It comes not just through concentration, but also through working on the opportunities for insight that the concentration provides. As the mind gets more and more still, you begin to see the mind’s attachments. You can see them as activities. Even its sense of itself, or your sense of yourself, is just a series of strategies you’ve devised. The Buddha calls these … 
  4. A Mind like Wind
     … This is why mindfulness practice shades ultimately into concentration practice because you’re sticking with one thing as your frame of reference and it becomes continual. The Buddha himself never drew a sharp line between mindfulness and concentration. Mindfulness as it grows stronger becomes concentration. It becomes purified in concentration, steadied so that your discernment can start doing its work; figuring out where there … 
  5. The Desire for Truth
     … Because as you get the mind into concentration, you begin to realize the concentration, too, is an action. It, too, is fabricated. It, too, has some stress—although the Buddha doesn’t call it suffering or stress in this context. He calls it a disturbance. You look for the disturbances in your concentration. You see where you’re causing them in the way you … 
  6. The Brightness of Life
     … getting the mind in concentration, getting in right concentration—which implies all of the factors of the path—and then watching what you’re doing. It’s in this ability to watch ourselves in action that we begin to see where the ignorance has been, and where we’ve been acting in a lot of ignorance. When we can see that, it changes the … 
  7. Relate Everything to the Breath
     … It’s the same with concentration. The concentration develops by your allowing it to just be here. You look after it and it’s going to do the growing without your having to worry about how quickly it’s going to grow or how tall or what direction it’s going to go in—or how soon you’re going to meet up with … 
  8. Thinking Your Way to Stillness
     … If you’re feeling discouraged in your practice, you can think about all the members of the Noble Sangha who went through really miserable times in their practice for one reason or another—either outside hardships, or just their own inability to get the mind concentrated. There’s the story of one monk who decided to commit suicide. He had been practicing for more … 
  9. The Governing Principle
     … In the very beginning, concentration comes in little tiny pieces—moments of stillness, moments of clarity, moments of ease. You want to learn how to recognize them, even as you’re just working with each in-and-out breath. Where in the breath is it comfortable? Where is it not? Can you smooth out the uncomfortable parts while maintaining the comfortable ones and learning … 
  10. The Ivory Intersection
     … If you lead a busy life, you need to develop concentration as the primary element of the path, because it’s nourishment for the mind, food for the mind. It’s what enables all the other factors to become right. You need other factors to make your concentration right, too, but concentration was the first element in the path that the Buddha himself discovered … 
  11. Trust in Heedfulness
     … And as the Buddha says frequently, the various members of the list—starting with conviction on through persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—are developed through heedfulness. Now, this may seem a strange combination: Conviction, on the one hand, implies trust; and heedfulness implies wariness. But if you look carefully at what heedfulness means, it means that you believe that your actions do make a … 
  12. Turtle Mind
    Ajaan Suwat would occasionally comment on the paradoxical nature of the mind in concentration. On the one hand, it’s very tender, very sensitive. On the other, it’s tough and resilient. The image that comes to mind is a turtle. A turtle’s body is very, very weak and gentle, so it needs a hard shell to protect it. As meditators, we have … 
  13. Present Kamma
     … As for pleasure, one of the things we try to develop as we concentrate is a sense of pleasure, because that makes it easier for us to let go of things we might other wise be thirsting after or hungering after outside. But to maintain that pleasure in concentration, you can’t let yourself get overcome by it. If you do, the concentration disintegrates … 
  14. Expert’s Mind
     … So he inclined his mind to concentration as an even more restful state that caused even less harm, less wear on himself and on other people. At the same time, when the mind is concentrated you can see yourself really clearly, you see the actions of the mind very clearly, because you give yourself a good reference point. The reference points could be the … 
  15. Approaching the four noble truths
     … Once things inside have settled down, ask yourself, “What am I doing that’s adding any unnecessary stress here?” As you get the mind into concentration, sometimes you find that you’re doing a lot of things to get it into concentration, because you’ve got to make sure it doesn’t go here, doesn’t go there. It’s like a mother hen … 
  16. Right View: Feeding Instructions
     … It’s the same way if you practice adopting right views, and practicing right concentration, and all the other right factors of the path. You get the results. So these things are right not because the Buddha said they were, but because they actually work. And right concentration is our food. It, too, is made out of those aggregates. You’ve got the form … 
  17. Visakha Puja
     … He was watching his mind as well, and brought a lot of good qualities of mind to his practice—concentration, ardency, and resolution, all of which are related to willpower, and also the element of discernment: seeing things in terms of cause and effect, what’s happening right now. The big question he addressed, which is a big question for everybody, was: Is it … 
  18. The Identity Crutch
     … Sometimes you’re warned about not getting attached to concentration, but you’ve got to be attached to concentration if you’re going to do it well. You have to see the pleasure of concentration as something you really like, something you really are interested in. That way, you put in the energy you need in order to master the concentration. So don’t … 
  19. Positive Right Speech
     … The Buddha says you want to observe the precepts in such a way that it’s conducive to concentration. And one of the ways of doing that is to check on your speech. Ajaan Fuang’s test always was, “Is this necessary?” And he had some very stringent standards for what was necessary speech. If you learn how to filter your speech in this … 
  20. Inconstancy
     … It’s only when you’re really established here that he has you start looking into the inconstancy of even the state of concentration. You see that it, too, has its subtle ups and downs. That insight motivates you to try to get into deeper concentration. In fact, this is how you move from one level of jhana into another, or to one of … 
  21. The Seven Factors for Awakening
     … The concentration factors in the path are right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. These are the things you want to keep in mind. As you’re watching the breath, as you’re paying attention to what’s going on in the present moment, remember that you’re not here just as an observer. You’ve got an agenda. Oftentimes, mindfulness is presented as … 
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