Search results for: "Attention"
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- Wilderness Wealth… He says to think of “earth” without paying attention to its hollows and irregularities—just its earthness, like a hide that’s stretched free of its wrinkles with a hundred pegs. Don’t think of any particulars of earth, but just remember that everything around you, everything within the body, is all earth. And as far as you can think out in any direction …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… You focus your attention totally on developing the path. And in developing the path, the realization of the end of suffering appears right there. So focus on bringing the mind to stillness. If the mind hasn’t yet come to stillness, ask yourself: What’s getting in the way? Use your ingenuity. It’s not just a matter of desire. You use desire, you …
- A Refuge from Karma… If you just sit here wallowing in how good it feels, it’s not going to feel good very long, because the cause for that good feeling comes from the fact that you’re alert, paying careful attention to the breath. If you lose that foundation, either you go into delusion concentration, which is pleasant but it’s like falling asleep, or else the …
- Accepting the Buddha’s Standards… You want to evaluate and adjust the breath, keep your attention focused on the breath until it gives rise to a sense of ease and fullness. Only when the mind is settled like this is it going to see anything clearly. Yesterday I read somebody complaining that they had seen a passage where someone had said that jhana is necessary for awakening, and he …
- Fixing the Present… They’re truths to be used right now, to focus your attention. If you’re suffering, well, what is the suffering? And what’s the cause? What arises together with the suffering and falls away when the suffering falls away? That’s something you can watch right here, right now, and you can see it more and more clearly as you develop factors of …
- Noble Right Concentration… Focus your attention there. Then ask yourself if long breathing is comfortable. If it is, keep it up. If not, you can change. You could make it even longer, or shorter, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. Try to notice when the rhythm and texture of the breathing feels good for the body right now. When you find a rhythm that feels good …
- Things Don’t Have to Be This Way… So, why create misery? Who wants it? It’s possible to develop a sense of fullness and well-being in the body simply by paying very careful attention to how you breathe—adjusting things here, adjusting things there, and noticing that, as the mind gets trained, it really does have the power not to suffer from the things that it used to suffer from …
- Encourage Yourself… It’s to focus our attention on what’s really important right now, which is the intentions we’re thinking right now, the intentions we’re following through with right now. He has many stories about the cycles of the universe, past lives, future results of present actions. They seem to point far away from the present. But actually they’re pointing right back …
- Three Levels of Concentration… You don’t want to look where your thoughts are pointing your attention; you want to look at them simply as fabrications. So all the important work in developing concentration and insight happens right here: learning how to deal first with pain and then with pleasure, so that the mind can settle down in a way that’s still, solid, and very alert, no …
- Discernment Fosters Concentration… In other words, in both cases, you develop analysis of qualities at the same time that you starve the hindrance of uncertainty by paying careful, appropriate attention to the skillfulness and lack of skillfulness in the mind. If you think about the Buddha’s description of how he got on the path, he learned how to divide his thoughts into two sorts: those imbued …
- A Culture of Self Reliance… That way, you’re free to focus more of your attention on developing your inner refuge. The freedom that comes from contentment with external things also gives you perspective on what work to take on to make your living. You just need enough in order to be able to practice. Most of the jobs that go beyond that also take a lot of time …
- Safety All Around… In fact, one of the biggest dangers is thinking that there is no such thing as an unskillful habit, that right and wrong are simply social conventions, and that you don’t have to pay attention to them. Or that your actions don’t really make a difference—that you don’t have freedom of choice, that because causes and conditions make you do …
- Cooking the Present Moment… That’s why we focus right here, right now, and pay very careful attention to what we’re doing and the results of what we’re doing, right here, right now. That’s what alertness is all about. Then we’re mindful to remember those lessons, and ardent in trying to improve our skills as cooks as much as we can.
- Concentration Food… With the formless states, like space or consciousness, you really depend on the consistency of the perception because there’s nothing else to hold your attention in place, nothing to fill in the gaps if the perception goes. So first you work with the breath, because the breath is there even when the perception lapses. That helps to create some continuity. In this way …
- Mission Possible… Or you can simply decide not to pay any attention to it at all. Let it chatter away in some corner of the mind, while you get to work. Or you realize that that thinking involves a certain amount of effort. Where do you feel that effort, especially where do you feel that effort in the body? Where is there a pattern of tension …
- Life in the Buddha’s Hospital… It’s important that we pay attention to our own course of treatment, and not worry about the treatments of others. If some people don’t seem to be recovering from their diseases as fast as you would like them to, well, again, it’s their disease. Try to keep this is mind. Remember what Ajaan Lee says: “When you look inside, it’s …
- Calm… There has to be some appropriate attention asking the right questions. When you figure out what your mind is doing that’s skillful and what’s not, then you can move on to persistence. Put forth the effort to encourage what’s skillful, discourage what’s not. There should come a sense of refreshment as you’re able to do that. That refreshment is …
- The Conditions for Goodwill… We work with the breath to develop our mindfulness to stitch together our moments of attention so that things don’t slip through the cracks. And as we work on the conditions, we get a goodwill that’s more and more reliable. It becomes totally reliable only with the noble attainments. That’s when the mind has found a basis for happiness inside that …
- Right Resolve & Right Concentration… What kind of mindstate are they reading in you right now if they happen to be paying attention to you? If you have any pride at all, you want to make sure that at the very least you’re struggling with the unskillful states and not just giving in. You can also make use of compassion. You realize that if you give in to …
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