Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. The Buddha’s Shoulds
     … You should develop the path; you should develop concentration. Anything that gets in the way of your concentration right now, you let go. And when you do this, you find that we benefit. That’s what the whole purpose of the teaching is. The Buddha’s teachings are strategic. They’re meant to bring people to that goal. They’re not just a description … 
  3. In Line with the Truth
     … That’s an expression the Buddha uses to describe the mind in concentration: the sense of well-being that’s not just in your head. It’s throughout the body. You develop alertness, watching what’s going on, to check and make sure that everything is where you want it. If it’s not, you can change. This way, the mind develops concentration, thinking … 
  4. To Comprehend Suffering
     … As the Buddha said, it’s when the mind is in concentration that it can see things as they’ve come into being, i.e., before you’ve manipulated them and dressed them up into something else. Just see the raw materials as they are. The mind in concentration can see them. The mind out of concentration can’t see them in that way … 
  5. Seeing Through Your Defilements
     … This is a part of concentration called directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath and then you evaluate it. Is it good, is it not good? Is the mind staying with it or is it not? What would be better? What would work better? Then try to keep your conversation on topic. Don’t be surprised if the mind will … 
  6. Afraid of Pleasure
     … It’s interesting that when he later formulated the noble eightfold path, he started with right view and ended up with right concentration, which is the four stages of jhana. But in the story he reflected first on jhana, and decided to make that the path. There are other passages in the Canon that talk about the path as being essentially right concentration with … 
  7. A Path for a Noble Desire
     … Based on that, all the other factors of the path follow, all the way up to right concentration, because for this message to really sink into the mind, you’ve got to get the mind focused. You’ve got to give it a sense of well-being that doesn’t depend on things outside. This concentration is not the goal of the path. After … 
  8. Meaning & Purpose
     … If you can’t have any desire in your practice, and you have to spend all your time analyzing dhammas, you’re not going to be able to complete the whole path, because concentration is part of the path. That person was saying: Trying to get the mind into concentration is actually an unskillful activity. The Buddha never said that. It’s a strategic … 
  9. Choosing Freedom
     … It’s not the case that when mindfulness comes or concentration comes, you just watch it come and go, and think you’ve had some great insight. Concentration comes? Okay, you try to maintain it. Learn how to maintain it and not crush it or squeeze it. Allow it to stay. Allow it to grow. And learn what needs to be done for it … 
  10. On Not Being a Victim
     … And the path, everything from right view on down to right concentration: These are all fabrications. Right view means learning to look at things in a certain way, learning to look for certain things. So learn to look for some concentration, look for some stillness, look for mindfulness. Their potentials are there. This is the Buddha’s basic teaching on dhatu , or element or … 
  11. The Power of Intention
     … The central factor in the path is right concentration, so work on this, because it’s right here where things will become apparent. You use your intentions to create the concentration, and then once the concentration is there, it allows you to see the power of intention even more clearly. The more clarity you bring to this, the more your actions do become a … 
  12. A Well-stocked Memory
     … Then, following that, come the factors deal with concentration directly: rapture, calm, concentration, equanimity. But there’s another description in which mindfulness is defined as being mindful of the Dhamma teachings you’ve memorized, that you’ve learned: what you’ve read, what you’ve listened to. Then analysis of dhammas has to do with sorting through what you’ve listened to, to figure … 
  13. Happy to Be Here
     … The Buddha talks about right concentration as being the heart of the path and the other factors as being its requisites, the things that help it along. So if your concentration is having problems, look at the other factors. Start with right view and right resolve, and then move around to the other ones, because they’re all related to this process of learning … 
  14. Breaking the Arrows
     … Then he thought of a time when he was younger, sitting under a tree, and his mind naturally entered concentration. He asked himself: Could that be the way? He decided it was worth trying. So he ended the self-torture, ate enough to regain the strength of body needed to do concentration practice, and from that he developed the mind to the point where … 
  15. The Five Precepts for the Mind
     … The ones that make it hard to get the mind into concentration, they’re bad for you, too. These are things you’ve got to avoid. And try to develop instead the pleasure of concentration. The Buddha calls this the pleasure of form. It’s a pleasure of a higher level. Just being able to be inside your body and inhabit it from the … 
  16. All for the Sake of Freedom
     … It’s going to say, “Well, it may not be perfect but it’s good enough for me.” One of the reasons why we try to get the mind into concentration and learn how to inhabit this sense of the body from within in a way that gives rise to ease and sense of well-being, a sense of really belonging here, is that … 
  17. The Ennobling Path
     … That’s the skill of right concentration. That’s where you sublimate your unskillful desires and you direct them here. There is a phrase someplace in the Canon, I don’t know exactly where, where the different levels of right concentration are called “the sport of the noble ones.” This is where they have their fun. They find their pleasure, they find their sense … 
  18. Keep Things Simple
     … Sometimes you realize, okay, just a bare amount of concentration, a bare amount of mindfulness is all you can manage, so you stick with that. Don’t throw it away simply because it’s not up to your standards. As Ajaan Lee says, “Big things come from little things,” and sometimes very tiny victories can add up. You stay with this breath and then … 
  19. Where You Set Your Heart
     … When we practice mindfulness in the way the Buddha described it, being very careful about where we do focus the mind and where we don’t focus the mind, of course it’s going to lead the mind to right concentration. The instructions for right mindfulness are just that: instructions on how to get the mind into right concentration. In fact, the Thai translation … 
  20. Not the Predictable Thing
     … He kept asking, “What’s the best thing to do with what I’ve got?” Once he got into right concentration, he didn’t just stay in concentration. He asked himself, “Is there knowledge that can be derived from this state of concentration?” The first question he asked himself to gain knowledge was: “How about previous births? Have I been born before?” He saw … 
  21. Dependent Co-arising in Fifteen Minutes
     … Finally, the third good thing to know about dependent co-arising is that it’s not foreign to the practice of concentration. As you get the mind into concentration, you’re actually using these various prior factors. Under the factor of fabrication, you have the breath: What are we looking at right now? We’re looking at the breath. You have directed thought and … 
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