Search results for: "Concentration"

  1. Page 95
  2. 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 … 
  3. Construction Techniques
     … You breathe in a way that gladdens the mind, breathe in a way that steadies or concentrates the mind, breathe in a way that releases the mind, breathe in a way that makes you sensitive to mental fabrication—what your perceptions and feelings are. In other words, get the mind really quiet with the breath, and then you begin to see that you have … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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