Search results for: "Concentration"
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- Holding on Strategically… In fact, ideally, as you’re getting into concentration, you want to have a sense that the body, the mind, and the breath are all one. The breath fills the body; the mind fills the body; the mind is one with the breath. They’re all sitting here together. Then you can use this sense of you inhabiting your space when you’re dealing …
- Focused on the Breath… After all, we’re here not just to rest in concentration. We’re here to learn about the mind. And one of the best ways of learning about the mind is trying to keep it in concentration—at the same time learning how not to be deceived by thoughts that’d pull you away. There’s a part of the mind that wants to …
- Take the Buddha Seriously… The concentration allows you to go deeper. After all, as you’re meditating here, you’ve got the breath, you’ve got yourself talking to yourself about the breath, you’ve got the perceptions that you have around the breath. What is the breath doing right now? Where is it going in the body? Then there are the feelings that arise from your directed …
- Thinking & Not Thinking… That way, the mind begins to settle down and get concentrated. Ultimately, you want the breath filling the body, a feeling of ease filling the body, and your awareness filling the body—all together. Then you put some thinking into maintaining that sense of altogether just right. But then you hear that there are higher levels of concentration where there’s no directed thought …
- Working from the Inside… There’s a slight of loosening in your concentration, or there’s a little bit of questioning or antsiness. Sometimes the decision to leave is made before you actually leave—on an underground level. You want to be alert for that. If you catch the mind loosening up like that, try to breathe in a way that’s really comfortable so that the mind …
- Disenchantment… This is what the practice of concentration is all about. You start by focusing on one object, like the breath, and then you stay with it long enough that you start developing a sense of oneness with it. Your awareness of the breath and the breath itself seem to become one and the same thing. There’s a sense of unification — ekodi-bhava — which …
- Steal the Dhamma… That was how he was able to get his mind into good concentration. After all, we’re following the path called the Middle Way. Extremes are easy. You just go for the extreme, as extreme as you can. With the Middle Way, though, you have to be sensitive. What kind of middle is the Buddha talking about? One extreme is indulgence in sensuality. The …
- Mindreading… We were talking this afternoon about patience, and one of the important qualities that helps patience is having a good state of concentration that feels good, so that when you’re being patient, developing powers of endurance is not a matter of simply gritting your teeth and putting up with things. You give the mind a good place to stay, so that whatever the …
- Goodwill & Kamma… Either you lose your concentration or you goes into what Ajaan Lee calls delusion concentration, where everything is pleasant but there’s very little definition of any kind at all. And you come out wondering, “Well, where was I just now? Was I awake? Was I asleep?” You weren’t asleep, but you’re at a loss to say where you actually were. The …
- Refuge in the Dhamma… What qualities do you want to develop in the mind? Virtue, concentration, discernment, mindfulness, alertness, patience, endurance? This is where you develop another level of refuge, when you start to take the Dhamma inside and you turn yourself into a more reliable person. If you work on developing your mind through mindfulness, you find over time that it really does make a difference in …
- Doubt… But if you get it focused and you start wondering, “What is concentration like? When they talk about the refreshment or rapture that comes from concentration, or the pleasure that comes from concentration: What is that like?” Then you know where to go. As Ajaan Lee says, the pleasure and rapture come from directed thought and evaluation centered on one object. So you do …
- More than Mindfulness… This, by the way, is one of the reasons why we translate samādhi as concentration. It’s not just a lucid calm. It may not be one-pointed, but it’s more intense than just calm. Calm is passaddhi. Samādhi is concentration. In samādhi, there’s an intensity to the whole range of your awareness. Wherever you’re focused, there’s an intensity that …
- Gratification… And if it so happens that virtue, concentration, and discernment are not your forte, then you’re really stuck, because these are skills that everybody needs. So be the sort of person that takes pleasure in learning, takes pleasure in meeting a challenge. If you don’t conquer the challenge right away, okay, just keep trying different angles, different ways. Find some enjoyment in …
- Levels of Truth… This is for use when your powers of concentration get better and you can start analyzing things simply in terms of stress, the mental movements that are causing the stress, and what to do so you can see those mental movements and see the stress, and learn how to put an end to the stress by putting an end to the cause or the …
- The Rewards of Cleanliness… The more precise you are about any little thing that comes in that’s going to disturb your concentration or disturb your peace of mind, then the more refined your concentration, the more clearly you see these things. When you get the mind to settle down, it’s like cleaning out your mind. And then you try to keep it clean. In the beginning …
- Capture Your Imagination… And if you know anything about the Buddha’s teachings on becoming, you’ll realize that this is immediately relevant to the state of mind that you’re creating as you breathe in and breathe out and try to develop concentration. You’re creating something. Then you want to hold it in mind. And then, as you hold it in mind, you want to …
- The Second Frame of Reference… There’s a sutta where he asks, “How do you develop the four establishings of mindfulness? You develop them by developing the eightfold path”—and that includes everything from right view on down through right effort and right concentration. Right mindfulness builds on right effort and is a natural continuation of it; it’s meant to lead toward right concentration. The Mahasatipatthana Sutta itself …
- Views, Virtue, & Mindfulness… You’re developing a quality that leads into concentration, because the purpose of being mindful is to bring the mind into a concentrated state, and one of the first factors in concentration is evaluation. You evaluate what’s going on in the meditation: How’s the breath going? Could it be better? If you’re skilled at judging your own behavior in general, it …
- Alone & Together… After all, the heart of the path is concentration. Concentration starts with being secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful mental qualities. If you can’t get secluded from other people, there’s no way you’re going to get secluded from these things in your mind. So it’s an important principle: You find time to be by yourself, to get to know yourself …
- The Not-Self Discourse… But even with concentration, where you’ve got the aggregates as solid and as constant as possible, you still see there are some ups and downs. It’s not quite perfect. You have to maintain those states of concentration. So the mind is still not totally free. So that’s the first attribute of self the Buddha was talking about: that it would be …
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