Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. The Mind Isn’t Hot
     … You learn concentration in the midst of what someone once called this booming, buzzing confusion: all the sensory data that’s coming in all the time. When you’re practicing concentration, you simply decide you’re going to hold on to one sensation, one notion, one idea, and anything else that comes up, you’re not going to go there. So think “breath.” When … 
  3. Mindful Judgment
     … Mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment: These are all things we have to some extent, and what we’re doing is learning how to take what we’ve got, to appreciate the good things we’ve got in the mind, and improve the conditions for their growing. It’s not the case that the mind is innately good or innately bad. It’s got good qualities … 
  4. Mindfulness as Refuge
     … Now the teachings on establishing mindfulness are basically the Buddha’s instructions for how to get in concentration. So it’s the mind in concentration that you’re going to have to rely on. You develop this by, as the Buddha says, keeping track of the body, ardent, alert, and mindful, putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. That means you … 
  5. Maybe the Buddha Knew Something
     … Here the Buddha says the food for a monk is the food of concentration. Tying the mind down means that if you’re going to stay in concentration, you can’t just wander around wherever the mind may go. Any thought that would pull you away, any desire that would pull you away, you’ve got to say No. At the same time, you … 
  6. Desires Rightly Directed
     … The Buddha has us put aside sensual fantasies, although he does promise us the pleasure of jhāna, the pleasure of concentration—so that we won’t be tempted to go back to sensuality. But in terms of the other three types of clinging, he gives us a view of the world in which action is really paramount. Action is powerful, and it doesn’t … 
  7. When This Is, That Is
     … Those can be a part of right concentration. The perceptions you have can be part of right view, but also right concentration and right mindfulness as well. The thought constructs you have, directing your thoughts to the breath, evaluating it: These become part of right concentration. Your awareness of all this becomes part of the path, too. In other words, you take all the … 
  8. Dharma Medicine
     … You see it: “Simply because I was perceiving it in a particular way, that was causing the problem.” This is why we spend so much time in concentration practice, because as the Buddha said, concentration is a perception attainment. You stay centered by holding a particular perception in mind. You try to sort through all the possible perceptions you can apply to what you … 
  9. Social Becomings
     … We do that by creating the becoming of concentration. You inhabit the world of your body. You focus on the breath. Try to make the breath comfortable. And then you are the meditator. You’re the observer. You’re the one who’s doing the meditation. You’re the one who’s trying to enjoy the meditation at the same time. And it’s … 
  10. Smoothing It
     … For the sake of concentration, for the sake of giving the mind a place to rest, you take the second option. You pursue that until you run into times where the second option just doesn’t work. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about the time when he had developed a fairly reliable concentration practice, until one night the pain in his body got so bad … 
  11. Think Your Way to Stillness
     … Because we’re trying to develop a concentration that is centered but all-around. All the Buddha’s images for right concentration talk about full body, full body, full body. There is that word “one-pointedness”—or in English it’s one pointedness, but in Pali it’s ekaggatā. But it doesn’t necessarily mean one-pointed. Eka- is one; agga can mean the … 
  12. Clinging, Addictions, Obsessions
     … Then there’s the practice of concentration: This is right mindfulness and right concentration. You find that these alternative forms of pleasure are better to pursue—and that you can tap into them. Addictive views, of course, have to be replaced with right views. One of the lessons of right view is that the important issue in life is not the pleasure that you … 
  13. From Heedfulness to Purity
     … Do you want to hold onto it or do you want to let go? So you bring the mind to the concentration usually with some confused motives. And the concentration, the mindfulness, allow for the discernment that’s going to allow us to see where the confusion lies, because we begin to see that it really does cause suffering, causes stress one way or … 
  14. Top Priorities
     … And the simple fact that the path centers on right concentration should give us an important message. There are a very limited number of things that we really have to focus on, that we really can benefit from developing, and there are a lot of things we have to let go. If you try to straighten out everything in life, the job never gets … 
  15. Alone with Your Mind
     … If nothing really clear comes, then you tell yourself, “Okay, I’ve got more work to do in terms of concentration,” and you go back to that. One of the important skills in concentration is learning how to put a question aside. They may be important questions, but you tell yourself—after looking at your ways of trying to deal with the questions and … 
  16. Pull Yourself Up by Your Fetters
     … You push against them by developing the path, getting the mind into concentration. And it’s something you hold on to while you’re developing it. While you’re sitting here, hold on to the breath. The image that they give in the Forest tradition is of a red ant. They have these big red ants in Thailand that live up in mango trees … 
  17. A Skillful Attitude
     … There’s a tendency to regard concentration practice and discernment practice as two different things, but ideally they should come together. And what are the four noble truths aside from a way of looking at your experience from the point of view of someone who wants to be skillful? You see where there’s discomfort or dis-ease—i.e., where there’s something … 
  18. Being Reliable
     … You get it by being generous, by being virtuous, by developing thoughts of goodwill, by developing your powers of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are all things that benefit you and other people. With things like generosity and virtue, the help really obvious. With goodwill it’s obvious. When you’re mindful to be looking for happiness inside, you’re not taking … 
  19. A Noble Path
     … This is one of the reasons why we practice concentration and try to get really good at it: so that we can sense the subtle things going on in the mind and see where they drive us; what they do—and then what we’re going to do about them, how we want to handle them, which things we want to hold onto, which … 
  20. Feel-Good Religion
     … After all, the establishings of mindfulness are the themes of concentration. It’s not as if you have mindfulness meditation and then concentration meditation. The two have to come together. In this way, you create a good place for the mind to stay in the present moment, and you’re not weighing yourself down with all that greed and distress with reference to the … 
  21. Glad to Be Here
    The Buddha’s instructions on how to get the mind in concentration start, on the one hand, with the reminder that you have to get past sensuality—your fascination with thinking thoughts about sensual pleasures. You can’t let the mind wander off in those areas. The Buddha says you should have a definite sense of the dangers of those places. That’s why … 
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