Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Right View about Right View
     … For instance, you’re trying to develop concentration. This is not the time to be thinking about the inconstancy and stressfulness of your concentration. You can apply perceptions of inconstancy and stressfulness to the distractions that pull you away, but for the concentration, you want to focus on this question: What can you make constant here? What sensations can you develop in the body … 
  3. The Pleasure of Concentration
     … The Buddha speaks of the pleasure of concentration as a way of pulling yourself away from your sensual desires, your lust, your greed: the things that create trouble in the world. Wherever you go looking for something, somebody else has already laid claimed to it, which means you have to fight other people to gain those pleasures. And when that pleasure comes, it just … 
  4. Appropriate Attention
     … Like right now, you’re trying to develop mindfulness; you’re trying to develop concentration. Anything else that comes into the mind, you can regard it as a hindrance—something that’s blocking the concentration—and so it should be let go. You’re setting down some new rules inside. Usually, for most of us, when craving comes, we take it as our companion … 
  5. Looking After Yourself
     … But try to test to see how little sleep you can get by on and still maintain your focus, still have a sense of ease in the concentration. We’re not here to push you into a neurotic breakthrough by denying you sleep. That doesn’t get you any closer to awakening. But you do want to learn how to use your concentration as … 
  6. When the Mind Is Still
     … There’s a sense of ease, you just go with the ease, forget the breath, and you get into what’s called delusion concentration, where you’re quiet, things are kind of hazy, you’re not really sure whether you’re awake or asleep. That’s not where you want to be. When you settle down, there’s still work to be done. The … 
  7. Heedfulness & Confidence
     … There’s training in virtue, concentration, discernment; or generosity, virtue and meditation. These skills provide us with protection, in teaching us how to deal with whatever negative things do come up, and how to send out a good energy. There’s a good energy that comes with generosity, and it tends to attract other good energies in the world. The same with virtue, the … 
  8. Feeding on the Breath
     … This is why directed thought and evaluation are part of the first stage in right concentration. You have to learn how to direct your mind to a topic it finds interesting. Then you evaluate and adjust it in such a way that you feel you can settle down with a sense of ease and well-being. The image the Buddha gives is of a … 
  9. Investing Your Happiness
     … At its heart, though, is Right Concentration. If you look at the definition of Right Concentration, that’s where you find the pleasure. The first jhana starts out with a sense of rapture and ease, or rapture and pleasure born of seclusion. In other words, you pull the mind away from its outside objects, outside distractions, and just stay right here. Then as you … 
  10. Goodwill First & Last
     … Two, the force of a concentrated mind can actually make that wish for goodwill more effective. I know many stories of people who’ve sensed when somebody’s been meditating and spreading thoughts of goodwill to them specifically, and they realize it, they sense it. The power of a concentrated mind gives a lot more energy to the thoughts that you focus on as … 
  11. Your Mind is Lying to You
     … After realizing that jhana was one of the factors of the path, he had to work on right resolve, i.e., training his mind to see what kind of thoughts lead toward concentration and what kind of thoughts lead away from concentration. In the same way, you look at your thoughts in terms of cause and effect. To what extent are they bringing the … 
  12. Goodwill for Free
     … There’s the divine dwelling of the mind in concentration, which is very spacious; there’s the immeasurable dwelling, which includes all the brahmaviharas; and finally, of course, there’s the noble dwelling of the noble attainments. That’s even more unlimited. The brahmaviharas are still in space and time. They still depend on fabrication. Goodwill is something you have to fabricate, especially if … 
  13. Happily on the Path
     … That thought is a happy thought, and one of the important actions you’re going to need to develop is learning how to get the mind still, centered in right concentration. The stages of right concentration are defined by their feeling tone. The first one is pleasure and rapture born of seclusion, accompanied by directed thought and evaluation. The pleasure gets more intense in … 
  14. Between You and Your Eyes
     … And it’s only through developing these qualities of right concentration that you’re ever going to get to really know right here, right now. It’s not something you know through passive knowing. It’s more an active knowing; it’s experimenting, so that you get to know the subtleties, the distinctions, of what a really concentrated mind is like, and the levels … 
  15. Recollection of Hell
     … You’re trying to turn these aggregates into factors of the path—right mindfulness and right concentration—a way out of all the potential heavens and hells to which the aggregates, these processes of fabrication, can lead you. Even the development of discernment in right view is a kind of perception. You apply the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self to the aggregates … 
  16. Strength of Mind
     … When you do that, the mind gets into concentration. That’s another one of the strengths of mind: your ability to stay with one thing comfortably, steadily. It feels nourishing. There’s a sense of ease that comes with that, a sense of pleasure, sometimes a sense of fullness. The mind is content to be here, and the body feels nourished. When the mind … 
  17. A Good Foundation
     … This is why the Buddha discovered that an important part of the path is the sense of pleasure, refreshment, that comes from getting the mind in good concentration. It’s also why he has so many different techniques for getting the mind into concentration. Breath is number one. As Ajaan Lee says, it’s your home base. All other meditation methods are foraging places … 
  18. Your Secret Foundation
     … You look in the Canon and you see that the most detailed meditation instructions are focused on the breath, the breath as a basis for establishing mindfulness, gaining concentration, discernment, release. Why is this all focused on the breath? For a lot of reasons. When you’re with the breath, you can see a lot of things in the body and the mind. It … 
  19. Negotiating with Death
     … Either it’s concentrated or it’s not. And when it’s not concentrated, it might be because it’s too energetic; too scattered or too depressed. But the Buddha doesn’t just leave us there with those states of mind. This is what the mental qualities are for. We’ve got to figure out which actions in the mind brought about that committee … 
  20. Secluded from Sensuality
    The description for a right concentration begins with the phrase that you’re secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful qualities. Sensuality is defined as your fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures, planning for sensual pleasures. If you have any thoughts like that, just put them aside. Unskillful qualities are defined as anything beginning with wrong view up through wrong mindfulness. So, if you’re … 
  21. Strength to Be Good
     … A sense of well-being that comes from concentrating the mind and the breath like this is an important strength. It’s really food for the mind. In addtion to concentration, the Buddha lists other strengths as well: conviction, effort, mindfulness, and discernment. Conviction here means belief in the Buddha’s awakening, that it really is possible through human effort to find true happiness … 
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