Search results for: "Concentration"

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  2. The Thinking Cure
     … For example, as we’re doing breath meditation, try to get the mind to settle down with the breath, get concentrated on the breath. As the Buddha said, every state of concentration depends on a perception, a mental label you create, a little message you can carry from one moment to the next, one that you can remember, that you can be mindful of … 
  3. The Brightness of Life
     … This is why we’re practicing concentration: to get the mind in shape so that it can master those solutions in the full conviction that, as Ajaan Fuang says, we can find the brightness of life. That was his comment about what he owed to Ajaan Lee. He said it was because of Ajaan Lee that he found the brightness of life. It’s … 
  4. Shelter Through Restraint
     … After all, concentration is restraint. You’re holding the mind on one object. You’re making up your mind not to go anyplace any else. Of course, there will be impulses that want to go someplace else, so you try to soothe them by making the breath comfortable. But then you’ve got to watch. You’ve got to protect your concentration, because the … 
  5. Cutting Through the Hype
     … There’s a tendency when we decide to concentrate on something that we clamp down, put a lot of pressure on it, for fear that if we don’t put a lot of pressure on it, we’re going to slip away. That makes it unpleasant, so that instead of keeping us here, the clamping down—as soon as we lose our focus or … 
  6. Change Your Mind
     … After all, there’s right view and wrong view, right resolve and wrong resolve, all the way down to right concentration and wrong concentration. You look at the stages in which the Buddha teaches mindfulness. First there’s establishing mindfulness in the body in and of itself, like we’re focusing on the breath right now. You try to be ardent, alert, and mindful … 
  7. A Taste of Freedom
     … The more you develop your mindfulness, your alertness, your concentration, and your discernment, the more you’re able to exercise your freedom right here, the freedom to choose your preoccupations. And then you have to choose them wisely. Wisdom comes from trying to get an answer to the question, “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The … 
  8. Circumspection
     … One is when he’s talking about concentration practice: your mind, which is flitting all over the place, you turn into a mind that can stay in one place. With the sense of the body as you feel it from within, which has its aches and its pains, you find where its potential for pleasure is, and you maximize that. This is one of … 
  9. The Energy to Be Generous
     … In fact, this is one of the main purposes of developing concentration: It gives you more energy with which you can practice. It’s like food for the mind. This is why we say that practicing meditation is a gift, not only to yourself but also to others. When you have more energy, at the very least it’s easier to be more forgiving … 
  10. Determination
     … You have to be willing to put up with pain, so you learn how to replace that with the pleasure of concentration. People often miss this point. They think that renunciation is totally barren: You give up good things and there’s nothing much to show for it. Actually, you’re giving up candy so that you can have gold. The pleasure of renunciation … 
  11. Ven. Ananda’s Awakening
     … And Ananda replies, “Yes.” He describes the four bases for success, one of which is concentration based on desire, accompanied by right effort. The brahman says, “In that case, it’s an endless path, because you can’t put an end to desire by using desire.” So Ananda asks him questions in return. “Before you came to this park, did you have a desire … 
  12. Goodwill Is Respect
     … Sometimes you hear the warning that if you get into concentration, you’ll get so absorbed in pleasure that you won’t want to go further on in insight. But actually, if you do your concentration right, you have to learn the right attitude toward the pleasure: It’s there, you let it do its work, but it’s not your focal point. The … 
  13. Is the Buddha’s Wisdom Selfish?
     … It’s to learn how to feed better inside by developing a state of concentration. We’ve got form again: the form of the body or the breath. The feeling of pleasure we’re trying to maintain as we focus on the breath. The perception of the breath that holds us here, how you picture the breath to yourself. Fabrication, how you talk to … 
  14. Respecting Death
     … But if but you can develop mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment, you can pare down this area of your identification, so that when the body goes, you realize it’s just the body. You don’t have to identify with it. Even when your brain starts malfunctioning, you realize it’s just the brain malfunctioning. You don’t have to get upset by it … 
  15. Food for Consciousness
     … If you change your focus, change your object of concentration, you create new experiences for yourself. You can actually create little worlds in here. We’re watching the creation of worlds even as we stay here with the breath. On the one hand, we’re trying to create a sense of inhabiting this world inside the body; but on the other, we can also … 
  16. Forging a Path
     … This does involve some thinking, in fact, the factors of right concentration start out with directed thought and evaluation, as mentioned in the chant just now. You may say, “I thought we’re here to learn how not to think.” And there does come a point in the meditation when the thinking processes really do die down, but you have to learn how to … 
  17. Food for Endurance
     … Because what does the Dhamma recommend? It recommends the noble eightfold path, and the heart to the noble eightfold path is right concentration. Right concentration is always defined by the feeling tone—either rapture and pleasure, or just pleasure on its own, or equanimity—all of which are good feelings that you can give rise to from within, totally independent of anything outside. That … 
  18. A Frame for the Day
     … You can’t do right view, or right resolve, or any of the factors through right concentration without intention, without fabricating them. You’ve got to put them together. And you find that there are other benefits as well. You can use the process of fabrication to frame your day. They say that when Ajaan Mun would wake up in the morning, the first … 
  19. Skilled in Aims
     … The way you do it is through the noble eightfold path, and that involves right view, right resolve, all the way down through right concentration, including right speech and right action—again, virtue. You’re acting in harmless ways. So you want to protect your right view—protect your goodwill—regardless, and this means making it independent of everything else, making it bigger than … 
  20. Eeeels
     … This is one of the reasons why the Buddha recommends right concentration as a whole-body awareness. Sometimes we hear that concentration means one-pointedness of mind, and we think, well, we’ve got to get it to one point. But if you got one-pointedness on a very subtle object, and the object disappears, you’re caught. If you try to hold on … 
  21. Stop Weaving
     … mindfulness, alertness, a sense of ease and rapture that come with concentration. These are a lot more gratifying, a lot more fulfilling. And you realize you’ve got the choice. You can either go with your old narratives or you can stick with your new skills. This is one of the reasons why it’s good to have the breath as your ally. It … 
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