Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Painful Feelings, Hurtful Words
     … We just chanted the factors of the path, from right view all the way down through right concentration. And each of the factors of the path helps us deal with unpleasant words and physical pain. Right view, of course, starts with that fact: These things are normal in the world. They’re going to happen. But why do we suffer from them? We suffer … 
  3. A Pure Happiness
     … Even with these strong states of concentration, there comes a point where you have to step back a bit and watch, to realize that you’re not made of that state of concentration. It’s something that’s there but there’s also an awareness that’s separate, that can watch, question, look. It’s that ability to pull back a little bit that … 
  4. For Your Good the Good of Others
     … It’s not the case that you get your concentration perfect and then you start thinking about discernment. To get the concentration going requires some discernment. When you realize that this is better than the mind’s normal preoccupations, that involves some discernment right there, as does seeing that you don’t have to go following every thought that comes up randomly in the … 
  5. Taming the Elephant
     … All too often, we think that “If I’m going to concentrate on something, I’ve got to squeeze it to make sure to stay there.” Instead, learn how to be with something and allow it to open up as you focus. There’s something that hunters call “scatter vision.” You need it when you’re hunting for mushrooms in the forest: the ability … 
  6. Doubting the Buddha
     … This is why we practice mindfulness, why we practice concentration, trying to give rise to a sense of rapture, a sense of refreshment, simply being with the breath. Rapture and refreshment are things you put together. The causes are simply focusing on one object and evaluating it, looking at it again and again, getting more and more sensitive to how you relate to it … 
  7. Large-hearted Equanimity
     … In other cases, they come through concentration. But in both cases, you have to have a sense of well-being that comes from the insight, well-being that comes from the concentration, before you get to the equanimity that comes from insight or from concentration. This way, you create what Ajaan Fuang would call, “large-hearted equanimity,” which he opposed to “small-hearted.” “Small … 
  8. You Can’t Eat the Buddha
     … conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are qualities we all have to some extent, but we’ve got to learn how to strengthen them, and they in turn make the mind stronger. So our food here isn’t bread and wine. Our food is concentration. The Buddha compared the different levels of concentration to different types of food. The first jhana, he said … 
  9. Samvega First
     … Just notice, what is it like to experience the body? What is it like to have a feeling? And how can you focus on the breath, which is part of the body, in such a way that gives rise to a good feeling? Because if you want to get the mind into a state of concentration, it needs a sense of ease, of well … 
  10. Inconstancy
     … One of the big obstacles to concentration, the Buddha said, is sensuality. Now, sensuality doesn’t mean sensual pleasures, it means your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures: which ones you want, which ones you’d like to get. You could spend the whole hour thinking about that if you wanted to. But then you could ask yourself, the object of most sensual desire … 
  11. Mastery
     … You may have found that moments of concentration, or even longer periods of concentration, give rise to a sense of ease. You develop mindfulness and all the other factors of the path. You see that the burdens, in the sense of weight in the heart, get lighter and lighter. But you don’t really know the path until you’ve fully mastered it to … 
  12. A Pleasure Without Stories
     … You look at the Buddha’s descriptions of right concentration: There’s pleasure in rapture. There’s pleasure in mental equanimity, physical pleasure. All the way up through the third jhana, there’s got to be pleasure of some kind because the mind needs that. As the Buddha said, you can’t tear yourself away from your attachment to sensuality unless you’ve got … 
  13. Kind & Happy
     … There’s happiness as one of the factors of concentration, even a sense of rapture and refreshment. If allow yourself to stay continually with the breath, it starts feeling really, really good. The more centered you are, the better it gets. This is the happiness that keeps you going on the path. As the Buddha said, concentration is like food for the path; a … 
  14. The Perfection of Freedom
     … Not only that, but given the fact that the mind is always feeding, concentration gives you something good to feed on, a sense of well-being that comes from within, that doesn’t depend on people outside or anything outside, doesn’t take anything away from anyone. When the mind is well fed, it’s more willing to look at alternatives, to look at … 
  15. Expanded Possibilities
     … There’s right resolve and wrong resolve, all the way down through the factors of the path to right concentration and wrong concentration. You act in the wrong way, you’re not going to get results—like trying to get milk out of a cow by squeezing its horn. If you act in the right way, you’re going to get the results. It … 
  16. Brahmaviharas & the Breath
     … But if you take an intelligent attitude toward it, you realize it’s something you can use as a basis both for settling down comfortably in the present moment and for developing strong concentration, the kind of concentration where your awareness fills the whole body in a way that’s all-around. This is important. If your concentration is one-pointed, there are huge … 
  17. To Make Suffering Crumble
     … When you have physical pain, first you want to be able to be with the pain and not feel that you have to run away from it or push it away, and that requires that you develop some good concentration. And where do you get the concentration? From the same five aggregates: You’ve got the breath, which is body or form, and you … 
  18. Put Your Heart into It
     … If you’re not honest, and your precepts are not honest, your concentration is not honest, your discernment is not honest, the practice isn’t going to get anywhere. Building on that, the Buddha talks of many other qualities of the heart. He extolls modesty, contentment, persistence, unburdensomeness. These are all qualities of the heart. We tend to think of someone being good-hearted … 
  19. Training Heart & Mind
     … As the Buddha said, people who are stingy and greedy can’t get into right concentration, to say nothing of levels of awakening. As for lack of virtue, there are people who are not virtuous who can get their minds strongly concentrated because they’re good at compartmentalizing their minds, but that concentration is not going to be honest. You have to learn first … 
  20. The Practice of Right View
     … And even with skillful thinking, he said there are times when it’s even more skillful to let the mind rest in right concentration. It’s another factor of the path. In fact it’s one of the central ones. There’s a passage where the Buddha refers to the other seven factors of the path as aids, as requisites to right concentration. Right … 
  21. Oozing Bodies, Oozing Minds
     … So what is this hunger you have for other people’s bodies, or for your body? And what misunderstanding is it based on? Now, to conduct this analysis properly, you also have to have a good solid base in concentration, although sometimes people can actually get the mind in a good state of concentration through this analysis. You think about the body for a … 
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