Buddhism 201 thread, since it's been a while:

Appropriate attention.

This is a very important concept in the canon, in the best records we have of the original teachings of the historical Buddha: "Appropriate attention", or in Pali, *yoniso manasikara*

Appropriate attention means using your powers of attention wisely, skillfully, in a way that will decrease delusion/suffering and increase wisdom/happiness.

It is to be contrasted with "bare attention" or "bare mindfulness", which is something that is taught in the West lately.

The Buddha notes that you can increase certain mental formations by dwelling on them.

Everyone sort of knows this. If you dwell on something you hate, you get angrier and angrier.

If you dwell on something you crave, you get more and more lustful until before you know it, you're horny on main.

But you can also dwell on pleasant feelings in a way that creates peace, stability, and strength.

This is the basic reason for the teaching on dhyana (pleasant, rapturous, absorbed concentration). The Buddha tried dhyana and found that it was a blameless, harmless, beneficial form of pleasure. There was no danger of it leading to suffering.

In the meditation, you can use appropriate attention to focus on pleasant breath (qi/prana) sensations and cause them to grow. You can use them as a dwelling place for the mind, a safe harbor that your mind can feel at peace in.

Once having created this safe harbor, having expanded it to the whole body, you are in a much stronger position to begin confronting your difficulties... your anger, jealousy, shame, fear, whatever.

But now you are doing it with APPROPRIATE attention. You're coming at these problems from a calm place of strength and peace. It would be inappropriate to totally ignore them, but it's also inappropriate to just sit and stew in these feelings.

At no point that I'm aware of, does the Buddha recommend you just sit there like a dope and "let everything pass by." He says you should use your powers of discrimination to put away useless thoughts and cultivate useful ones.

Meditation is a skill, and the Buddha spoke about it like a skill. Like carpentry, like archery, like cooking, it can be taught, it can be learned, and it can be mastered. To do so, requires appropriate attention.

You don't become a good carpenter by just going into a room full of wood and swinging a hammer around randomly. You don't become a good meditator by just sitting on a cushion and randomly letting thoughts do whatever. You're WORKING on something.

And just like carpentry is useful for making nice things out of wood, appropriate attention is extremely useful for creating states of calm and well-being that can then be used for penetrating insight, the killing of delusion, and the liberation of the heart.

/thread