Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Guardian Meditations
     … Then think of it down the line as it gets older and dies and becomes a corpse. All the stuff you find disgusting in a corpse are right here, right now, anyhow already, it’s just that they’re disguised by the fact that there’s breath and warmth in the body. Once the breath and the warmth are gone, what we’ve got … 
  3. The Path of Action
     … This is where right view becomes part of right effort. And then you have to be alert to what’s actually happening in your mind. The states that are running through your mind: Are they skillful or are they unskillful? Should you give them credence or should you try to undercut them? So it’s a combination of right view and right mindfulness that … 
  4. Joy in Effort
     … You stress and strain with your heart firmly set on the time someday in the far distant future when you’ll finally become awakened. The other approach is to realize that the Dhamma is all around you in the present moment. You just relax into the present moment and there you are. Now, if those were the two only alternatives, the second would obviously … 
  5. Patience & Sensitivity
     … You’re trying to use his concepts as tools for opening up, becoming sensitive to areas you weren’t sensitive to before. It’s like people who learn how to be professional tasters. They have to learn a huge vocabulary for the subtle differences in tastes. The subtleties are there, but if you don’t have a vocabulary to describe them, you’re not … 
  6. Body & Food
     … He says, you take the body and you take it apart to all its pieces, again and again and again until it becomes second nature. Every time you see a body, you think about what’s inside that body, so that lust doesn’t have a chance to arise. Then you put things back together again and test where exactly, at what point, does … 
  7. Different Minds, Different Bodies
     … When you can get those parts to open up and develop a sense of fullness and ease, it becomes a lot more compelling. So remember, there are variations in the raw material you bring to the meditation each time you sit down, which will require variations in the techniques, variations in your approach. But this is a basic principle with any skill. Sometimes, when … 
  8. The Allure of Sensuality
     … Eventually we develop a real hankering for it, and then it does become the case that you will do anything at all, even when you know it’s bad for you to try to get that pleasure—and that’s scary, because it means that the mind is totally heedless at that point. So the Buddha’s question always is, “Do you really love … 
  9. Goodwill & Kamma
     … What you focus on is going to become the actual kammic result you experience. And so it’s the intention there that’s important, the intention to pay attention to the breath continuously, that keeps that feeling going. Two, the Buddha’s also reminding you that you don’t switch your attention away from the breath to focus in on the feeling. If you … 
  10. A Mental Fortress
     … It’s this way that your good intentions become skillful, and even when you do make a mistake, the fact that you were operating on good intentions to begin with makes it a lot easier to live with the fact that you made a mistake. It’s in this way that your practice stays protected—you’re protected and you’re protecting others through … 
  11. Judging Just Right
     … This is why the Buddha said that it’s only at stream-entry that a person becomes independent in the Dhamma and can see where it’s going. That puts your powers of judgment on a firm basis. Before that point, they’re still going to be wobbly. So try to find somebody you can trust. Get a sense of how they ask questions … 
  12. Opportunities Everywhere
     … The things that’ll be helpful are the good qualities you’ve developed in the mind, the understanding you’ve developed about how the mind creates states of becoming: again, more of those balloons. At that particular point, it’s going to be especially serious because if you get in a particular balloon, you might find yourself in a whole other body in a … 
  13. The Flamethrowing Mind
     … Think about the process of becoming. It starts out with some pretty unpromising raw materials: feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, acts of consciousness—very simple things that are not very lasting. In fact, they’re very ephemeral. Yet we want to create a sense of our identity as a solid thing we can depend on, and the world as something we can depend on. And … 
  14. Large Perspective, Small Focus
     … Even though he had many, many lives to observe, the pattern didn’t become clear. It was only in his second knowledge, when he saw all beings in the universe going through this pattern, that he was able to see what the pattern was: that it was connected with their actions; their actions came from their intentions and their views. Only then was he … 
  15. The Psychology of Harmlessness
     … how to understand the mind so that it can become skillful. Very skillful. All the Buddha’s analysis of mental functions is pointed to that purpose. This is why when someone was asked one time if the Buddha taught whether the world was eternal or not eternal, finite or infinite, going down the whole list of the hot issues of the day— it was … 
  16. Ripples Go Far
     … Otherwise, the meditation becomes very self-indulgent, very narcissistic: “This is what I’m doing for myself right now, and that’s it.” That gets old really fast. When you take the larger view, it’s a lot easier to depersonalize what’s going on in the mind. So if a thought that comes up isn’t just your favorite thought or your favorite … 
  17. Refuge in the Dhamma
     … That’s where the whole idea of heedfulness becomes possible and where it really makes sense. As the Buddha said, “All skillful actions boil down to heedfulness.” Heedfulness contains them all. It’s the root of all of them. In other words, we do good things not because our nature compels us to be good. We do them because we realize the results of … 
  18. Escape Routes in the Present
     … As you make the most of them, then questions of patient endurance, equanimity, tolerance become a lot easier to handle.
  19. Practicing from Gratitude
     … The more continual your gaze, the more refined the sense of the breath will become, and the more refined the sense of pleasure you get from it. It’ll go deeper and deeper into the heart. Then think of that sense of well-being spreading. You don’t have to push it or pull it out, just think of it radiating out. You’ll … 
  20. Levels of Truth
     … Ajaan Mun calls it the level where all four truths become one. The Buddha doesn’t give it a particular name, he just calls it the right view of seeing everything arising and passing away simply as stress arising, stress passing away. In this case, the four categories are reduced to one. That’s because at that point the path has been developed and … 
  21. Good Fences All Around You
     … Having the fence also helps you become aware of ways in which your mind is unruly, creating a lot of trouble that you might not have noticed otherwise—as when we’re practicing concentration here. We establish ourselves in one of the frames of reference—the body in and of itself, or feelings, mind states in and of themselves—although primarily though the body … 
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