Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Thoughts with Fangs
     … There’s a passage where the Buddha mentions that it’s a sign of an untrue person who, on gaining strong concentration, uses that attainment to measure himself against other people. “I’ve got this attainment; they don’t have this attainment. I’m better than they are, I’m a better meditator.” That right there blocks the insight that could come from that … 
  3. Go Out of Your Way
     … The Buddha talks about how it’s important to have a sense of well-being, a sense of joy, for the mind to settle down in concentration. One of the sources of joy is that you’re in a community where everybody has the same views, everybody has the same virtue on the level of the noble ones, and we’re all generous with … 
  4. Strength of Conviction
     … strength of conviction, strength of persistence, strength of mindfulness, strength of concentration, and strength of discernment. These are the things that carried them through. Whatever the difficulties they had to face—and there were many—these were the strengths they were able to fall back on, and able to develop, all the way to the point of the deathless. There’s that passage where … 
  5. Taking Responsibility
     … This is, on the one hand, why we practice concentration: to give the mind a sense of pleasure so that it’s not desperate in its movements, so that if something new comes up, you won’t just go running for it just because you want anything but where you are. You want to put yourself in a good place. Focus on the breath … 
  6. The Perception of Space
     … If you’re going to get *any *kind of concentration, you have to be able to let go of everything that comes up. Don’t make a little mark that says, “I want to get back to that later.” Just let it go, let it go. The Buddha made a statement one time when he’d given up his wish to continue living. Ven … 
  7. Quiet in Every Way
     … In fact, you find that a lot of the progress in concentration practice comes from noticing even more subtle levels of chatter and letting them go. Then you run across an even more subtle level. You keep peeling away, finding all kinds of crazy things being said in the mind. But you let them go, until it’s just the chatter that keeps the … 
  8. Cooking with Kamma
     … You just learn how to make use of them and turn them into your concentration food: the sense of rapture, the sense of well-being that comes when the mind gets settled down like this. The Buddha describes this in his analogy of being a meditator as being like a good cook who learns to read his master’s desires. Sometimes the master will … 
  9. Judicious vs. Judgmental
     … Our concentration practice gives us a comfortable center in our awareness where we can rest, where we feel less threatened by things. When we feel less threatened and less oppressed, we have the resilience to be more patient, to look into what’s going on in the mind, and to develop the proper attitudes toward what is skillful and what isn’t. This is … 
  10. On Idle Chatter
     … That’s a bad habit to develop if you’re trying to become a meditator, both in terms of trying to get the mind into concentration and just learning how to watch your own mind. If you’re used to just talking all day, then when the time comes to sit and meditate, the mind says, “Hey, I’ve been churning out thoughts all … 
  11. Friends with the Breath
     … virtue, concentration, discernment. At the moment we’re focusing on the concentration. But all three are involved. Virtue is a quality of normalcy in our intentions, harmlessness in our intentions. As we’re sitting here meditating, we’re not harming anybody at all. Not only that, we’re not planning to harm anybody. We’re here focusing on getting our mind straightened out. And … 
  12. Always Observe Your Mind
     … It’s the ability that allows you to improve your concentration and then to begin to learn how to analyze concentration when it’s gotten really good. So the practice is seamless. Everything the Buddha teaches us, as he says, is contained in the four noble truths. The message of the four noble truths is again and again and again: The causes for suffering … 
  13. Give of Yourself
     … There’s the potential for calm, concentration, within your body and mind. But where those potentials are and how you develop them through appropriate attention, again, he doesn’t say. You have to explore. Then there’s the question of how to interpret his teachings. There’s a place where he says that some of his teachings are meant to have their inferences drawn … 
  14. Responsibilities
     … No one else can make you virtuous, no one else can make you concentrated, no one else can get you to see everything with discernment, so that when death comes, you’re ready for it. This is a perspective you should always have in mind: Which responsibilities are the ones that, as death approaches, you’ll look back on and be happy you took … 
  15. To Sustain Your Practice
    Ajaan Fuang used to comment that there were three stages to concentration. First is learning how to do it. Second is learning how to maintain it, and third is learning how to put it to use. You can hear the instructions and focus on the breath—and anybody can focus on the breath. What makes the difference is the maintaining. How do you stick … 
  16. An Admirable Friend — In Memory of Luang Loong
     … developing mindfulness, concentration, discernment, persistence. Underlying all this is the conviction that this is really useful, this is really a worthwhile project: training the mind, realizing that the mind is the major factor in life, shaping your happiness and sorrow, your pleasure and pain. It needs to be trained so that its actions yield the happiness you want, a happiness that doesn’t harm … 
  17. In Touch with Your Fabrications
     … Once you see how they’re used to fashion a state of concentration, then you begin to notice that, as you go through the day, you use them to fabricate other mental states—some of which are skillful, some of which are not. And you learn, if you see that you’re doing it in an unskillful way, that you have the choice to … 
  18. Farming Your Body & Mind
     … This is one of the reasons why we try to create a pleasant state of concentration, so that when the mind is hungry for pleasure, you can say, “Well, here it is. Why go looking for it someplace else?” Especially, “Why get engaged in thoughts that are going to have bad consequences?” Here you’ve got pleasure that’s free. All it requires is … 
  19. Ideals
     … He practiced with conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment as best he could. But after having given his all, he realized that the paths these teachers were teaching were deficient. So he tried the path of austerities. He put his life on the line and almost died. After six years he finally realized that this was not going to be the path, either. But … 
  20. Scramble the Image
     … red, yellow, orange, white, green, blue.” And if the thought was indifferent, well, fine, you just make sure that that hasn’t kidnapped your concentration. If it’s not so indifferent, if there’s more of an emotional pull to that particular image, then it’s even more important that you learn how to scramble it. After all, that’s how you dig out … 
  21. How the Tree Leans
     … One of the reasons why we develop concentration is to train the mind to hold on to one direction. Some people think that when you sit in the present moment, you’re outside of time. That’s not the case. The present moment is moving. It is time. And as the mind moves through time, what direction is it going in? It’s going … 
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