Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Dealing with Pain
     … You’re trying to work up your own strength, because it requires strength of concentration to be able to comprehend exactly what it is around the experience of physical pain that becomes mental pain. So you don’t want to take it on too quickly. Develop the qualities of the path—your mindfulness, your alertness, and your concentration—so that they’re strong enough … 
  3. Dispassion Isn’t Depression
     … We fabricate them into a state of concentration and then we try to keep maintaining that state of concentration. Of course, in doing that we can learn a lot. It’s like the Army Corps of Engineers trying to keep the Mississippi River in its channel: Over the course of the many years that they’ve been trying to do this, they’ve learned … 
  4. Put Your Books Back on the Shelf
     … You’re not showing any intelligence at all.” And then I realized, “Why do I have to be intelligent, commenting on the breath? What’s there to be original about being in concentration?” Ajaan Lee would often say, “There are times when you have to be willing to be stupid.” In other words, you don’t have to have a clever comment on what … 
  5. Infinite Good Humor
    When teaching concentration, the forest ajaans rarely go into detail about a particular technique. Instead, they talk about developing a particular attitude, one of samvega: looking around and seeing that all the things that you might want to think about are not really worth thinking about, looking at the mind’s own tendency to go after those things, and realizing that you don’t … 
  6. Protection Through the Practice
     … You’ve got to make your concentration bigger, your goodwill bigger: All the good qualities of the mind you have to make large. Remember the Buddha’s examples: making your mind like earth, making your mind like the river Ganges, making it like space. Space is infinite. If your concentration or discernment get larger, then you begin to see that the perceptions you’ve … 
  7. A Victory that Matters
     … This is why you’re practicing concentration. You try to develop a state of good solid concentration in the mind with a sense of ease and wellbeing that can come simply from being with the breath, being absorbed in the breath, filling the breath energy throughout the body with a sense of healthy energy. This puts you in a good position to compare things … 
  8. The Buddha’s Tools
     … So this is why his strategy—based on right mindfulness, getting into right concentration—allows you to see the mind a lot more clearly, and again, in the terms that he recommends. When you’re getting the mind into concentration, you find that you’re dealing with form, the form of the body, of the breath; feelings of pleasure and pain, neither pleasure nor … 
  9. The Origination of Suffering
     … As the Buddha said, to get the mind in concentration, you have to be secluded from sensuality. Any thoughts that come up about sensual pleasures, you have to put them aside. Instead, you create a state of becoming here around a different kind of pleasure, the pleasure of form: the body as you feel it from within. And you try to adjust it so … 
  10. Don’t Limit Yourself
     … As for concentration, you keep your focus. With concentration, you’re trying to keep your focus going as long as possible. And again, it enables you to see things you didn’t see before. It gives strength to the mind, gives a sense of well-being to the mind. You start knowing things about the mind that you didn’t think you could know … 
  11. A Divine Seat
     … The Buddha talks about getting the mind into concentration as a divine seat. Get the mind into the first jhana, and there’s a sense of ease and rapture filling the body. You can work it through the body. When you’re sitting in that state, you’re in a divine seat. So create a divine seat for yourself tonight. Focus on the breath … 
  12. Stay
     … And it’s an important concept to keep in mind as we practice, especially as we’re working on concentration. We’re trying to bring the mind into balance and then maintain that balance. Sometimes the getting into balance is the harder part, and sometimes the maintaining is the harder part. You want to be good at both. Getting into balance means you have … 
  13. Wandering On, Shooting Arrows
     … Based on conviction comes joy, and from joy there comes concentration, from concentration comes discernment, through discernment you finally get to release, and then to the vijjā—the knowledge—that cuts through everything. So, it’s that switch to conviction that makes the difference. Ordinarily, the Buddha says, when we encounter suffering, there are two responses. One is bewilderment: “How does this happen? Why … 
  14. Full, Focused Attention
     … The more consistently you stay here, then the more concentration develops. So all these factors—right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration—have to work together if you’re going to gain any results. And it’s not necessary that you draw distinct lines between them. Bring them together. The mindfulness and the effort slough into the concentration, and the path all comes together … 
  15. The Burning House
     … So even though concentration provides us with a home here in the present moment, it’s a burning house. For the time being, as we work on our concentration, we try to find a room to stay where it’s cool, where things are fireproof, or relatively fireproof, so we can figure out what’s going on in the rest of the house. But … 
  16. Remorse
     … In other words, you develop concentration; you develop discernment. Having concentration as an alternative to sensual pain and pleasure puts you in a safe place, so that when pains come, you have an alternative place to go. That way, the pains don’t have to drive you around. And as you’ve learned in getting the mind to settle down: If, when you’re … 
  17. Right Effort
     … Sometimes you hear that if concentration comes, just note the fact the concentration is there, don’t get attached to it. Just watch it go away, and you’ll see the truth of inconstancy. That’s not what the Buddha taught. Your duty here, once you’ve given rise to it, is to generate the desire to develop it, to bring it to culmination … 
  18. Your Judgments Matter
     … The more intense your concentration, the more one-angled you get, which is one of the reasons why we develop the kind of concentration that spreads your awareness around and makes a lot of use of your powers of evaluation. You’re not told that you have to breathe in a certain way. It’s up to you find whatever way of breathing seems … 
  19. Rooted in Desire
     … Even before you get to concentration, the Buddha says you want to gladden the mind. So you gladden it with things that are in line with the Dhamma. Gladden it with generosity; gladden it with virtue. Then you can get it glad with concentration and discernment. The path creates a sense of well-being. It doesn’t lead only to nibbāna. That’s not … 
  20. Your World to Practice In
     … Years back, I was teaching in Malaysia, and I was told that laypeople shouldn’t be doing concentration practice because it’s so hard. They should just do mindfulness practice instead. But an important part of the concentration is that it gives your meditation a sense of refreshment, a sense of nourishment. When the Buddha compares the different parts of the path to a … 
  21. The Mind Like Water
     … There’s another analogy where the Buddha talks about the different hindrances that come up as you’re trying to use your mindfulness to get the mind into concentration. Sensual desire is like dye that you put into the water. Ill will is like boiling the water. Sloth and torpor are like slime and algae that grow in the water. Restlessness and anxiety are … 
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