Search results for: "Concentration"

  1. Page 64
  2. A Mental Fortress
     … And of course, the soldiers and the gatekeeper need food, and that’s what concentration is for. The Buddha talks about the various levels of jhana, and with each level, the food gets better and better. You have to remember that in order to keep with the practice, you need a sense of well-being. Whatever the level of concentration is, try to get … 
  3. Taking an Active Role
     … Realize that it’s a pleasure based on concentration and mindfulness, so the questions are: How do you extend the concentration? How do you extend the mindfulness? How can you best keep them going? When you take on this more proactive role, you begin to discover there are many more potentials here in the present moment than you might have ever imagined.
  4. The Duties of Happiness
     … That’s at the end of the path, when you’ve taken care of all the members of the mind, and the mind gets more and more unified in its agreement that this is the way you want to find happiness, based on this path of virtue, concentration, and discernment, with concentration the big middle ground that gets the mind right here in the … 
  5. Learn from the Ants
     … So even when he was studying with the teachers who taught very high levels of concentration—the dimension of nothingness, the dimension of neither perception and non-perception—he saw that they’d developed conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. They devoted good qualities of the mind to this, but they rested content with something that wasn’t ultimate. He, however, wasn’t satisfied … 
  6. Good Fences All Around You
     … Having the fence also helps you become aware of ways in which your mind is unruly, creating a lot of trouble that you might not have noticed otherwise—as when we’re practicing concentration here. We establish ourselves in one of the frames of reference—the body in and of itself, or feelings, mind states in and of themselves—although primarily though the body … 
  7. Full Attention
     … Remind yourself that whatever issue may come up in life, you’re going to need mindfulness, you’re going to need alertness, along with good powers of concentration and discernment. So the responsible thing right now is to let go of all your other responsibilities and work on these qualities. The future is very uncertain, but what is certain is that you’re going … 
  8. Wise about Happiness
    When Ajaan Lee analyses the qualities that you bring into mindfulness practice—and by extension to concentration practice—he singles out ardency as the wisdom factor. Which is interesting. It’s the factor that has to do with effort, the effort you put into being mindful, into gaining concentration, trying to see into your defilements. Ardency is what does this. And ardency is wisdom … 
  9. Take Good Aim
     … I said to him, “You must have good concentration.” He said, “Your mind has to be constant.” In other words, you can’t waver. This is one of the reasons why we’re working on concentration—to develop that steady, constant, unwavering quality of focus that enables our discernment to do its work. And what is the work of discernment? To understand our cravings … 
  10. Safety
     … The Buddha calls this practice not only right mindfulness, but also a form of concentration. There’s a passage where one of the nuns of the Buddha’s time identified the themes of right concentration as the four establishings of mindfulness. They’re very closely connected. There’s another passage where the Buddha himself talks about focusing on the body in and of itself … 
  11. Exercising the Mind
     … You start with mindfulness, alertness, and ardency, and you start developing concentration and discernment. If you really are ardent at being mindful and alert, the mind is going to start staying more and more consistently with the breath. It can begin to relax with the breath. All too often, the mind is like a cat that jumps here and jumps there. If it knows … 
  12. Freedom from Fear
    Part of the formula for right mindfulness, and the means for getting the mind into right concentration, is “putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world.” In times when that’s hard, when you have anxieties about what’s going on in the world, fear about what’s going to happen, you have to learn how to get that fear under control … 
  13. Look at Yourself
     … Even around really refined states of concentration, as the Buddha points out, it is possible to get a state of concentration, and your reaction is the wrong one: the pride that you’ve developed this state that other people haven’t been able to develop; that comparing mind, what Ajaan Maha Boowa calls “the fangs of ignorance.” It’s one thing to have a … 
  14. No Mistakes Are Fatal
     … concentration based on desire and Right Effort; concentration based on persistence, or energy and Right Effort; concentration based on intentness and Right Effort; and concentration based on the mind’s powers of analysis and Right Effort. And he talks about how important it is to reach a balance in all these factors, because your desire can be too strong, too weak. Your persistence can … 
  15. The Power of Perception
    When you’re concentrated on the breath, you’re trying to hold one perception in mind: just the label, “breath.” Think for a minute about what the breath can be. It can be the feeling of the air coming in and out through the nose; it can be the feeling of the energy coursing through your body. It’s all part of what they … 
  16. The Middle Way
     … qualities of what you do, what you say, how you think—or to look at it in another way, virtue, concentration, and discernment. What we’re working on right now is the concentration. How are you going to make your concentration part of the middle way? For one thing, you have to look at the other ways that your mind is tempted to deal … 
  17. Verified Confidence
     … After all, you can use the brahmaviharas to get the mind into good, strong concentration. There’s one passage where the Buddha says you can get into the first jhana with the first brahmavihara, the second with the second, the third with the third, the fourth with the fourth. But there’s another where he says you can use the concentration based on the … 
  18. Preparing to Die Well
     … Even though eventually we try to let go of all states of becoming, we do that first by developing a skillful state of becoming—right concentration of the mind—which gives a standpoint from which we can gain practice in letting go of grosser pleasures, grosser attachments. The main attachments you let go when you’re developing concentration are the hindrances, beginning with sensual … 
  19. Working Hypotheses
     … Then the Buddha also compares the mind in concentration to a fire, but it’s a different kind of fire. The flames of greed, aversion, and delusion are like the flames of a bonfire. They flicker here, flicker there. They’re so unstable, so erratic, that you can’t really read by them. And they create all sorts of weird shadows, lots of false … 
  20. Play with the Breath
     … All too often that’s our idea of what it means to focus or to concentrate, so we tense up around the parts of the body where we’re concentrating. That interrupts the flow of the energy, doesn’t feel good. So spread your focus in a more scattershot way. Wherever you focus, you relax. Wherever you focus, you relax, like an atomizing beam … 
  21. The Need for a Purpose
     … Someone asked the Buddha one time, “What is virtue for?” “Virtue is for the sake of developing concentration.” “What’s concentration for?” “Concentration is for the sake of developing discernment.” “What’s discernment for?” “For the sake of release.” “What’s release for?” “For the sake of unbinding, total freedom.” “What’s unbinding for?” The Buddha said, “No, stop there. Your question is going … 
  22. Load next page...