Search results for: "Attention"
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- Meditators at Work… We’re not here just to treat diseases, but that’s one of the ways of getting the mind to really want to focus on the breath, to pay attention to it, and to take an interest in it. Then you can get into the issue of when you have a vagrant thought, what happened to the breath? How does the breath relate to …
- Focus on Your Intention… The Buddha wants to get you attached here at the concentration, so that when you finally do turn your attention on the fabricated nature of the concentration and start trying to develop dispassion for it and use the perceptions that would lead to dispassion, this will be your last attachment. You’ll clearly see it as being inconstant: Even though there’s a solid …
- The Essence of the Dhamma… This means that you turn your attention away from trying to make your hut as nice as possible, or your robes as nice as possible, or worrying about the food, or the diet. Those are not the issues. The issues are the skillful and unskillful qualities in your mind. Now in addition to being content about the right things, the Buddha also says you …
- The Breathing Game… They get us to draw one cartoon, while they do their tricks in the areas from which they deflect our attention. But the problem is that we base our intentions on our cartoons, and then we act on our intentions, thinking they’re going to make us happy. Yet so many times, we end up causing suffering for ourselves and for other people. This …
- Meditator, Mediator… The amount of attention and alertness that you bring to developing the skill: Those are the qualities that you develop gradually that eventually will lead to the sudden breakthrough. So it’s through the path that you find the end of suffering. The qualities of mind that you need in developing that skill are the ones that eventually will reach the point where they …
- Big Desire, Detailed Focus… What kind of breathing feels good? We’ve been breathing in the past, we have lots of experience with breathing, but for the most part we haven’t paid much attention to it. So try to notice when the breath is comfortable, when it’s not. Learn how to recognize the signs that, when you’ve been breathing in, at what point the breath …
- A Complete Training… Nobody else in the room seemed to be paying any attention. I found it very strange. But I was told later that this was a common occurrence in what you might call walk-in meditation retreats, where people come in off the street with no background in the precepts, no background in generosity, and they start looking at their minds and they don’t …
- In the Land of Wrong View… You don’t want your attention to be distracted by other people’s behavior. At most you look at them as examples: Is this person’s behavior a good example? A bad example? But your primary focus has to be on what you’re doing right now. That’s one of the questions the Buddha has the monks ask themselves everyday: “Days and night …
- Choices… Whereas if you focus attention on what you’re doing, on the choices you’re making, and getting more sensitive to them, you find something inside the mind that is not a choice, that is not conditioned, lying right next to your freedom of choice. This is where you’re going to find it. So learn how to exercise your freedom, exercise your power …
- From Darkness to Light… Right here is where you focus your attention. It doesn’t matter how long the process has been going on. The fact that you can stop it now means that it’ll have to stop. Ajaan Suwat’s image is of a cave that has been dark for who knows how long. If you bring in a light, he said, the darkness has no …
- The Buddha’s Relationship Advice… Back when I was in Thailand, there was a famous monk whose monastery I visited once, and he seemed to pay an awful lot of attention to me. I began to get the sense that he wanted me to leave Ajaan Fuang and come and stay at his monastery. I really didn’t trust him, even though he was highly regarded in general. I …
- Equanimity… The factors of the practice are the ones we need to pay attention to. The one that’s a by-product is going to happen on its own. But the ones we work with—developing the equanimity that allows us to endure things, developing an even deeper equanimity that allows us to see things really clearly, very deeply in the mind: Those are the …
- Happily on the Path… fabrication, intentions, attention, perceptions, feelings. We’re actively shaping things, and that’s what we’re trying to train: the way the mind shapes its experience. Part of that is learning how to find joy in simple things like generosity and virtue, and moving up to finding joy in the concentration, joy in the fact that you’re getting some control of your mind …
- What You Can’t Change, What You Can… We’re not paying very careful attention to how we shape our experience. We crave for things to be a way that they can’t be. Or even when we crave for things to be a way they can be, those things are going to change on us, and that ultimately leads to disappointment. That disappointment is what you’ve got to look into …
- The Rivers of Karma… You’ve got all these pain receptors in your body, along with the various parts of your nervous system that make the decision as to which little pains you’re going to pay attention to and which ones you’re going to ignore. Most of this happens on a sub-conscious level, but as you meditate you train yourself to become more conscious of …
- Between You and Your Eyes… Out attention is mainly focused someplace else—on our plans for the future, issues from the past—so that what’s immediately present is simply used as a means to something else. As a result, the important issues in life—the things that are immediately present to our awareness, the things we’re doing right now—we don’t really comprehend. Even something as …
- In the Present… But when you’re sitting here doing concentration, you want your attention to be more and more totally right here—but still with that sense of mindfulness, of holding the right things in mind. If you lose your mindfulness, the concentration drifts into what Ajaan Lee calls “delusion concentration,” where you lose sense of where you’re focused, where you are in time and …
- Respect as a Sign of Intelligence… All too often, we’re doing things and our minds are half here and half someplace else, so our actions get only half of our attention, if that. When the results come, we can’t really be sure where they came from, because we don’t even know what we did, or we have a confused notion of what we did. But if you …
- Head & Heart… And when you learn to ignore them, to pay them no attention, it’s like a bullet that seemed to be aimed at your heart but suddenly just falls on to the ground. So there are times when it’s effective to see this practice as a kind of battlefield, with skillful and unskillful desires battling it out, and you’ve got to learn …
- Directing & Not Directing the Mind… In terms of the Buddha’s classic ways of dealing with distractions, this falls under just not paying attention to any distraction or relaxing any tension in the body around the distraction that would correspond to the thought. Because when you’re thinking of something that’s not right here, right now—something not immediately apparent to your senses—you’ve got to create …
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