Respect for Emptiness
November 15, 2003
Respect for concentration. It’s interesting that of the factors of the path — virtue, concentration, and discernment — the Buddha singled out concentration as something worthy of respect. At one point he called it the heart of the path. And yet the reason he needs to remind us to respect it is because we tend to overlook it, to step on it. Those little moments of stillness in the mind: We tend to ignore them, we don’t pay them much attention. We’re so much more interested in running after things, getting the mind all stirred up, yet ignoring those little moments of stillness between what basically come down to moments of disturbance in the mind.