Search results for: "Concentration"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Therapeutic Seclusion… That’s why we do concentration, trying to get the mind as still as possible, with a sense of well-being inside, a sense of well-being that fills the whole body. This is why we work with the breath energies in different parts of the body, and why it’s worth your while to try to get to know what exactly the breath …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Don’t Get Discouraged… Some people find the concentration easy but then the discernment is hard. Other people find the discernment easy but the concentration hard. Some people find both sides hard. So we have to have a way of reinforcing our conviction until we begin to see the results. Then the results themselves begin to become fuel for our further practice. But you look at the Buddha …
- A Goal Without Limits… Some people say the Buddha here is referring to the concentration of infinite consciousness and not to nibbāna, but the concentration of infinite consciousness does contain some of the sub-factors of name: It’s based on a perception, the perception infinite consciousness, and it’s maintained by acts of attention and intention. So when the Buddha says that there’s no name or …
- True for What Purpose?… The same with the concentration: You focus on the breath, you talk to yourself about how the breath can be comfortable here, it can be comfortable there. There may be parts of the body that are in pain, but you don’t have to focus on them. You focus on the parts that you can make comfortable. Get them on your side. Then, once …
- Joy & Discontent… That’s part of right concentration. And even before right concentration, it’s how you talk to yourself throughout the path. People sometimes come and ask, ”How do I do this directed thought and evaluation?” Well, you’re doing it all the time. You pick up a topic and then you comment on it. Pick up another topic and comment on it. Or you …
- Discipline… Even in mindfulness practice, going into concentration practice, you have to set some limits for where the mind is going to go. Certain things are off-limits. An image they use in the Canon is a group of monkeys who live in the Himalayas. Some of them stay in the area where only monkeys go, while some of them move into areas where human …
- Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!… Build a basis around a nice state of concentration and start getting proud of it? The concentration’s gone; the value of that practice is gone. So you have to be very careful. You have to learn how not to create a sense of self, of your identity around these things. That’s how you get to the other shore. There can be a …
- It’s Good to Talk to Yourself… The Buddha calls it directed thought and evaluation, two of the factors of jhana, strong concentration. Then even when the questions and answers settle down, there are still perceptions—the images you hold in your mind—and those carry you all the way through many of the even very refined levels of concentration. So the trick is not so much stopping your thinking, but …
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