Search results for: "Concentration"

  1. Page 79
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. Breath Meditation – The Four Tetrads
     … You can release it from your lust, you can release it from your anger, you can release it from your laziness, you can release it from all sorts of unskillful things just to get it into concentration. Once you’ve got it in concentration, then you want to look more carefully: What things are you still holding on to? Some of the things you … 
  16. Slowing Down to Look
     … This is why you need mindfulness practice, why you need concentration practice, to put your mind in a laboratory. You’re going to stay right here at the breath. You can’t wander off, can’t go anyplace else. And like the elephant with its forest memories and forest desires, the mind is going to stray. But if you treat it right, if you … 
  17. Strategies for Generosity
     … One of the roles of concentration is that it gets things really, really quiet and really, really still. You become more and more sensitive. It’s like listening to a piece of music. If you’re humming to yourself inside, you don’t hear a lot of the subtleties in the music. But if you make yourself very, very quiet inside, some of the … 
  18. The Craft of the Heart
     … The doing is creating a state of concentration; the observing is watching yourself as you do it, both to make sure that your mind does settle down as you want it to and to see what other things you learn about the mind in the course of getting it to settle down. So you’ve got to develop these two faculties together, to make … 
  19. A New Framework
     … things like conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. You have to be very alive to the difference that your choices make. This is where we push ourselves out of the bell curve: by being very careful about what we do. Ardent: This is usually translated in terms of right effort. You recognize what’s skillful, you recognize what’s unskillful, and you do what you … 
  20. Respect for the Breath
     … As Ajaan Suwat once said, a well concentrated mind is both soft and hard: soft in the sense that you’re very sensitive to your object, very sensitive to how the body feels and how the mind is relating to the body; but hard in the sense that you’re not going to waver. You’re going to stay just with this whole-body … 
  21. True Freedom of Speech
     … So you’re training your directed thoughts, you’re training your acts of evaluation, in preparation for the practice of concentration. As we sit here meditating, we have to talk to ourselves. For the concentration to go well, we have to engage in right speech inside, too: telling ourselves things that are true, telling ourselves things that will not divide the mind as it … 
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