Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. Meditate Because You Have To
     … You can stay with the breath, or whatever your topic of concentration is. And instead of trying to keep one eye on what landmarks you’re passing, or whether the goal seems to be coming into sight, or whether it seems to be receding away, you just focus on what you’re doing. This is the best way to interpret that statement that the … 
  3. Four Virtues
     … All of this develops good qualities in the mind, qualities that are important in developing concentration and discernment. There’s a continuity, the same theme all the way through. As one of the forest ajaans once said, Dhamma is one thing clear through, starting with generosity and going up all the way to the noble attainments. So as you’re working on your precepts … 
  4. Selves with Skills
     … They describe how we succeed in putting a state of concentration together, based on desire, persistence, intent, and your powers of analysis. And just as we tend to identify with whatever skills we already have and tend to use, the Buddha wants to teach you how to create a state of concentration—and it doesn’t matter that you create a sense of identity … 
  5. Feeding on the Breath
     … everything from right view all the way through right concentration. They provide good food for the mind—particularly right concentration. It’s a sense of well-being that gives us genuine nourishment. As we get the mind to settle down, we learn about the mind. We begin to see its feeding habits a lot more clearly. So start looking at the breath as your … 
  6. Correcting, Fostering, Cutting Away
    Ajaan Lee says there are three tasks in concentration practice, and they apply to giving rise to insight as well. The three are correcting, fostering, and cutting away. For example, you focus on the breath, but the mind is not settling down with the breath. The question is, what can you correct? Is the problem with the mind, or is the problem with the … 
  7. The Demands of Goodwill
     … Then, as I pointed out, you can bring the mind to fairly deep states of concentration with the practice of goodwill, even deeper states with equanimity—and then you have to analyze them. One, use the power of your concentration to look at your fascination with sensual pleasures. See why it is that you go for those things. See what the allure is, see … 
  8. Count Yourself Lucky
     … It’s learning to focus on them and to make the most of them that makes it easier and easier to stay here, to develop stronger powers of concentration, to develop the path. When obstacles come up, learn how to recognize them as obstacles. All too often we tend to identify with them, “This is the real me, this is how I really think … 
  9. Homage Through the Practice
     … Then, in maintaining it there, the next step is concentration. Concentration actually means keeping the mind centered so that it’s stable. When the mind is centered and stable, there’s a sense of well-being. And even though it’s dependent on conditions, this well-being is very, very useful. This center inside is very useful. The more you can develop this center … 
  10. Speech for the Sake of Stillness
     … So he inclined his mind into concentration. That thoughts inclining his mind into concentration were a kind of internal speech, but speech leading in the right direction. So you want your speech to be speech that leads to stillness, speech that leads to harmony, speech that leads to peace, both inside and out. That’s the right use of our human ability to talk … 
  11. Events as Events
     … You do that by developing the path, everything from right view all the way through right concentration. When you look at things in these terms, it’s a lot easier to do the right duty because it’s pretty obvious. A certain perception has an effect on the breath, or a certain way of paying attention to the breath will have an effect on … 
  12. Delight in the Path
     … As the mind gets more quiet, a more exquisite form of happiness or well-being can be found through the concentration. You get a different perspective on things. What seemed to be pleasure, you see as actually stressful. That’s how what was hidden is now revealed: the ways of the mind in creating these worlds. You see how empty a lot of the … 
  13. Gather ’Round the Breath
     … You need more concentration. So any thoughts that complain about this, you have to recognize them for what they are—disturbances—and you can’t identify with them. What you’re doing here is that you’re shifting the balance of power inside, and giving more priority to this stillness. In the past, the priority was given to thought fabrication, and all the public … 
  14. This Fathom-Long Body
     … One purpose of this is to help get the mind concentrated, but the other purpose is to give you a sense of how arbitrary your sense of who-you-are and where-you-are can be. Once you gain an insight into how arbitrary that is, it’s a lot easier to let go of unskillful ways of fashioning a self, unskillful types of … 
  15. Magha Puja: Showing Respect with the Practice
     … The practice of concentration is called heightening the mind. You’re letting go of all your sensual concerns and raising the mind to a higher level. You’re trying to find a sense of peace, a sense of well-being that comes simply from having your awareness settled inside. To focus on the breath, to know when it’s coming in, to know when … 
  16. The Path Has a Goal
     … First he mastered some very high levels of concentration that his early teachers taught as the goal. One was the dimension of nothingness; the other was the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception. Yet the Buddha realized that neither of these attainments was the goal for which he was looking. So he left those teachers and went off to try to find another … 
  17. Lessons from the Breath
     … If you don’t get along, the mind isn’t going to settle down, and you’re not going to get much concentration. There will be very little peace of mind. When you’ve learned your lessons here, you can take those lessons and apply them outside as well. To get along with other people, you’ve got to listen to them, be sensitive … 
  18. Mindfulness of Death & the Deathless
     … This, of course, is one of the reasons why we practice concentration, because it’s a very good way of seeing how the mind sends out its feelers. It creates a thought-world and then it goes into that thought-world. That’s the process of what the Buddha calls “becoming,” followed by “birth.” So the process that would lead to rebirth is happening … 
  19. The Wisdom of Restraint
     … Even skillful thoughts, he said, he would have to keep in check as he got the mind to settle down in concentration. To bring the mind to concentration, you have to exert a lot of restraint. You can think only the thoughts that are connected with the breath. Any other thought, no matter how fascinating or interesting or right it may be, is wrong … 
  20. The Escape of Discipline
     … In fact, the first factor of the path that the Buddha discovered is right concentration: ease, pleasure, rapture, filling the body. Then there are the other elements of the path as well: Virtue for instance, abstaining from harmful behavior. And although parts of the mind like to engage in harmful behavior, when you think of your position in life as a whole it’s … 
  21. Harmony, Right & Wrong
    When we bring the mind into concentration, we’re trying to bring the body and the mind together in harmony in a right relationship. Both of those aspects are important: both the harmony and the right relationship. This is why we spend so much time with directed thought and evaluation at the beginning: evaluating the breath, evaluating the mind, to see how the body … 
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