Search results for: "The Mind"
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- Established in Full… For some people the word concentration seems to evoke images of getting the mind in a very narrow focus. This is a different kind of concentration, though. The mind is centered, which is why we call it concentration, but your awareness fills the body the same way as when you look at a painting: You focus on one spot that may be the most …
- A Path of Aggregates… Then from the spine, of course, it goes down the legs—whatever perception you find helps the mind to settle down with a sense of well-being. Fabrication here, in the beginning, is how you talk to yourself. Talk to yourself about the breath. If the mind is wandering away, you remind yourself, “Hey, come back!” That’s directed thought. Keep the mind coming …
- Change Your Habits… This is an experiment we’re working with right now, to see what ways we can get the mind interested in the breath, and what ways we can use that interest to help with the body and help with the mind. And we stick with it. We’ve got a whole hour, which is not much time, you realize, out of a day. There …
- Take the Buddha Seriously… It’s just an event in the mind, and I have the choice of going with it or not”: That’s when you can gain that inner victory. So we’re sitting here meditating. Lots of different voices can keep coming up in the mind right now, so you want to get some practice in saying No to the unskillful ones. Of course, this …
- Solo Practice… When the mind is sluggish, he says you want to start questioning things. There’s first what he calls analysis of qualities: basically analyzing the qualities of the mind, seeing what’s skillful right now, what’s not skillful right now. And when you get a sense of what’s skillful, then you work at augmenting it, bringing it into being and strengthening it …
- Stop Weaving… As the Buddha said, if you want to understand that the problems of the mind, the unskillful habits of the mind, you first have to look at what kind of gratification you get out of maintaining them. Even the habits you don’t like about yourself: There’s got to be something that you enjoy in them. Otherwise, they wouldn’t keep coming back …
- Fire… That allows the mind to settle down with something that’s more solid, more continuous. In fact, the more connected everything is inside, the easier it is to settle down into deeper and deeper levels of concentration. The breath gets more subtle; the mind, more secure. Then when things really are connected, all you have to do is to focus on one spot and …
- Don’t Get Discouraged… So if you find the mind wandering off from the breath, just keep bringing it back. It wanders off again, bring it back again. Do your best not to get discouraged. Remember, you’ve been training the mind to wander for who-knows-how-many lifetimes. That’s what the word samsara means: It’s the wandering-on. We tend to think of samsara …
- The Meaning of Insight… Each time the question comes up and there’s a little stirring of a thought in the mind, choose to come back to the breath. Let the thought go, unless it’s a thought related to the breath and helpful for getting the mind to settle down. The mind is always making choices, both when you’re meditating and when you’re not. In …
- Dependent Co-arising in Fifteen Minutes… These are the things you need to do in order to get the mind to settle down. It’s not the case that you get the mind quiet and then magically it’ll understand the five aggregates because it’s quiet. It understands the five aggregates because you’ve been using those five aggregates, learning how to look at these things as activities, as …
- From Dependence to Independence… Now, there’s a large part of the mind that would rather not make the effort, would like to dismiss the whole thing. But you can ask yourself: “What kind of part of the mind is that? Where will it lead you?”* *As long as we’re human beings, we might as well act on the possibility that we can be honorable beings, we …
- For Your Good the Good of Others… It’s also techniques, strategies for dealing with all the different ways the mind creates suffering. Learn to think strategically as you get the mind to settle down. Then once the mind has settled down, learn how to use that settled-down mind in a strategic way as well. It has lots of uses as you go through the world. It’s not just …
- Taking Charge… When it’s really resolved on those things, where else will the mind go but into good concentration? Then as the mind is really concentrated, it’s able to be secluded from unskillful mental states. And when unskillful mental states come back, you can see them clearly. This is how concentration fosters discernment. And, in turn, the discernment fosters your concentration. You begin to …
- Taming the Elephant… Again, this comes under directed thought and evaluation, as you learn how to adjust the mind to the breath or the breath to the mind. You all learn how to be together on good terms. So, take an interest in this. This is an important part of the meditation: learning how to listen to the needs of the body. Notice when you’re putting …
- Building on Certainty… Look at the mind in the present moment, look what it’s doing. In other words, look for its intentions. Look to see how much stress or pain or suffering those intentions are causing and learn how to cause less. Those are the basic instructions. The test is something very immediate: your own immediate experience. And yet for most of us, immediate experience is …
- The Message of Mindfulness… Then, as the mind begins to settle in, those fabrications grow more subtle. When you’re able to stay well with the breath, the breath feels good. There’s a sense that the mind begins to dissolve into the breath. The mind and the breath become one. Your awareness fills the body. The breath fills the body. At that point, you can drop the …
- Seclusion… There’s what the Buddha calls our asavas, these things that flow out of the mind. The mind has a tendency to go flowing out the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body. Think of it as your brain is going out the eyes, the ears, the nose. It’s a pretty disgusting image, but that’s what the mind does. It …
- Momentum Through Restraint… As you go through the day, you look at something, you listen to something, and if you see that the way you’re looking or listening will create greed, lust, anger, or delusion in the mind, you have to ask yourself, “Why are you looking in that way?” Restraint doesn’t mean that you put blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears …
- The Particulars of Your Suffering… And you find that as you try to bring the mind into oneness with its object, you have to learn how to isolate these particular functions of the mind, these aspects of your experience, so that you can adjust them skillfully. How do you adjust the form, i.e., the breath? Well, that requires fabrication and it also requires perception because some perceptions get …
- In Line with the Truth… That’s an expression the Buddha uses to describe the mind in concentration: the sense of well-being that’s not just in your head. It’s throughout the body. You develop alertness, watching what’s going on, to check and make sure that everything is where you want it. If it’s not, you can change. This way, the mind develops concentration, thinking …
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