Search results for: "Attention"

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  2. At the Door of the Cage
     … I didn’t have the soundtrack to go by, but even without paying much attention I found the story pretty easy to figure out. The hero had a miserable family life, and so when the opportunity came to step onto that humongous flying saucer and go off who-knows-where, he was willing to go. Now, if he had had a happy family life … 
  3. Issues of Control
     … Remind yourself that you have some responsibilities here, and they’re not going to get done by paying a lot of attention to what’s going on in the world outside. One of the Buddha’s definitions of the difference between a wise person and a fool is that the wise person knows what duties fall to him or her, and takes on those … 
  4. The Mind's Immune System
     … You don’t pay much attention to them. You don’t really see them, because you’re out looking for the pleasure and trying to push away the pain. The neutral feelings seem unimportant, and so a lot of delusion comes into the mind right at that point. That’s where the Buddha says the ignorance obsession tends to focus. He said that these … 
  5. The Range of Our Responsibility
     … They can be anything from the thoughts that direct your thinking to the breath or your attention to the breath, or the thoughts that encourage you. This is a really important part of the meditation that often gets overlooked: learning how to encourage yourself, to remind yourself, “This is something really good and you have the ability to do it.” There was a sad … 
  6. A True Person
     … The people who pay careful attention, who try to think the Dhamma through: They’re a good example. The people who put it into practice: They’re a good example. So you look for people whose behavior is exemplary. They pull you up and make you a better person because you want to be like them. All of these things are qualities that are … 
  7. An Inside Job
     … Sights come in and there are certain sights that you pay attention to and others that you don’t. You interpret them in different ways. The same thing with all the other input that comes through the senses—and it’s your shaping of that input that makes a difference between whether it’s going to cause suffering in the mind or not. And … 
  8. Overcoming Obstacles
     … So give this issue your full attention. What’s needed to be done to get the mind to settle down? What’s needed to understand this process of fabrication that’s constantly going on in the mind with which we create our experience out of the raw materials that come from the past? This process, the Buddha said, is so stressful but it only … 
  9. To Purify the Heart
     … You’re not paying attention to the fact of how you’re reacting to things, and so you can miss a lot of things that way. Which is why, when the Buddha taught Rahula, he taught him to look at his actions throughout the day, his speech throughout the day, his thoughts throughout the day. You want to watch yourself not only while you … 
  10. Good & Independent
     … Where do you feel that energy? How does it feel? Does it feel good? Do you want an energy that’s nourishing? Calming if you’ve been upset? Energizing if you’ve been tired? Relaxing if you’ve been tense? If you pay a lot of attention, you realize that that energy responds very quickly to thoughts in the mind. You can say to … 
  11. The River Gauge
     … What can you do for them to satisfy them? That gets your attention more and more focused right here, interested in exploring right here. In that way, you don’t have to talk to yourself so much about why it’s a good thing to be meditating. It feels good to be meditating. It’s interesting to be meditating. There’s a sense of … 
  12. Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness
     … the desire to do it skillfully; the persistence that sticks with it till you’ve mastered it; intentness, paying a lot of attention to what you’re doing; and analysis, using your powers of discernment to see what’s not yet right, trying to figure out how to get around problems, how to solve them. This fourth factor also involves ingenuity — all the active … 
  13. Looking After Yourself
    The Buddha’s last words were to reach completion in the practice by being heedful, which focuses attention on the word heedful. It’s important to notice who he was talking to. The text tells us that all the monks in the assembly were at the very least stream-enterers, in other words, people who’d had their first taste of awakening, their first … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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