Search results for: "Concentration"

  1. Page 80
  2. An Inside Job
     … The mind begins to get more and more inclined to want to find stillness, so it turns more and more to concentration. At first, the concentration seems very peaceful compared to everything else, to the point where you would think it may be unfabricated. It’s just there, especially as you tune into deeper and deeper levels of concentration with an unbounded sense of … 
  3. Conviction & Focus
     … There’s the list of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. That’s the standard one in The Wings to Awakening. Then there’s another one, the strengths of a person in training: conviction, a sense of shame—a healthy sense of shame— compunction, persistence, and discernment. The two lists have conviction, persistence, and discernment in common. Those are the core strengths. It’s … 
  4. Analyzing Results
     … This is how the practice of concentration can lead to sharpening your discernment. The discernment and the concentration help each other along.
  5. A Basis in Well-being
     … The sense of pleasure and the well-being that come in concentration, the Buddha realized that these can’t be taken as the goal of the practice, but they are the path. They give you the strength and the sense of security you need in order to gain a really balanced discernment into the way you act, into the way you do things, into … 
  6. Heedful of Small Dangers
     … You develop your first level of wisdom in the practice of concentration as you learn how to sidestep the distractions that would pull you away, the thoughts that say, “You’ve got to think about this, you’ve got to worry about this, now you’ve got a whole hour, let’s think about this. You’ll enjoy it.” You’ve got to treat … 
  7. Suffering Comes from What You’re Doing
     … This is why we get the mind into concentration, get it to settle down so that we can watch these things in action. Now, sometimes it takes a while for it to settle down. In that case, you have to be patient. Because if the mind is restless and you’re impatient with your restless mind, that just stokes the fire. So find some … 
  8. There is This
     … This is one of the reasons why we get the mind concentrated because as the Buddha said, once the mind is concentrated, you can see the aggregates as they arise, as they’re originated by conditions. You can see events at the sense spheres. You can analyze your sense of the body into aggregates and properties. When the mind is still in the present … 
  9. Well-armed Efforts
     … For instance, when you’re getting the mind in concentration, you’ve got the breath, which is bodily fabrication; you’ve got directed thought and evaluation devoted to seeing how the breath can be made comfortable and how the mind can be made to stay with the breath; and then you have mental fabrication, the perceptions you have around the breath that help you … 
  10. A Diffuse Light
     … This is probably the best perception you can have to get the mind into strong states of concentration where the breath is minimal and yet you don’t feel starved of breath. You actually feel full. It may take a while to work up to this. You start out with a sense that you’re going to spotlight some parts of the body rather … 
  11. Stick with It
     … You’re developing mindfulness, you’re developing concentration. And a part of concentration is a sense of ease and well-being, a sense of fullness, so that the mind is willing to settle down to become one with the breath. Then as you develop that sense of ease, the sense of being centered, try to maintain it. That’s one of the more difficult … 
  12. Prepare to Die
     … You can develop qualities of mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment: These things really will hold you in good stead. A lot of the techniques we’re practicing as we meditate will come in useful as we get sick, and especially useful at death. Even this technique of focusing the mind on one thing and learning how to let go of everything else: That’s going … 
  13. The Choice Not to Suffer
     … One of the reasons we develop a large frame of reference in our concentration—being aware of the whole body—is to have a sense that these things can go right through you, and you don’t have to be affected by them. You don’t have to be knocked off your center. If you’re experiencing physical pain, in the beginning you don … 
  14. Faith in Present Intentions
     … We develop virtue, concentration, discernment so the mind is not overcome by pain or by pleasure. When you’ve developed those qualities of mind, it actually can have an effect on past bad actions. They can’t turn the results of bad actions into something good, but they can minimize the bad. The important thing is what we do with our minds right now … 
  15. Facing Pain Straight On
    When you give the mind an exercise to do—like focusing on the breath, contemplating the virtues of the Buddha, developing goodwill, or even some of practices that are said to be vipassana practice—they’re all actually concentration practices. You tell the mind to do something, you will the mind to do something—that’s the concentration—and then you observe it. That … 
  16. Guardian Meditations, Right & Wrong
     … We practice concentration to get a sense of well-being, but we need a sense of heedfulness at the same time, to protect the concentration and put it to as best use as we can. It’s in these ways that all these meditations guard us. They guard us against heedlessness. In every case, that’s what they’re about. We remind ourselves that … 
  17. Delighting the Mind
     … What’s happening, especially with these last two forms of delight, is that you’re moving from gladdening the mind into concentrating the mind, and then from concentrating the mind into releasing the mind, which completes the four steps that the Buddha lists in his discussion of mind as it develops in breath meditation. So the gladdening does a lot of the work. Remind … 
  18. The Dhamma Channel
     … So one of the reasons we get the mind into concentration is so it can settle down, get a shield from those rays, and tune in to the channel of the Dhamma. Seeing cause and effect, where there’s suffering, where there’s stress, what’s causing it, what can be done to put an end to it: When you look for that, you … 
  19. Flexibility
     … Ajaan Fuang would often talk of the different levels of concentration not in terms of this jhāna or that jhana, but he would say to focus on the breath and feel it this way, then think of the breath that way, then experience the breath this way, and you find yourself going through levels of concentration. Or sometimes he would have you give your … 
  20. Generating Energy
     … You’re going to need mindfulness, you’re going to need alertness, you’re going to need as much concentration and discernment as you can muster. And when are you going to develop those qualities if you don’t develop them now? Right now is an ideal opportunity. You’re sitting here meditating. It’s quiet around you. One of the contemplations the Buddha … 
  21. Discernment Through Right Effort
     … If you’ve got some mindfulness, how do you keep it going? If you’ve got some concentration, how do you keep it going? I can give you advice on that, but the real discernment comes when you figure out how to do it for yourself: how to read your situation and figure out what kind of effort is needed right now. Then, of … 
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