Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Home Schooling Your Inner Children… It’s also something that children do so that they can become grownups, responsible grownups, happy grownups. So when you set your list of priorities for the day, remember that meditation has to come up, if not first, then at least second. There’s a general in the army I read about one time. She would make a list every day of the things …
- Tranquility, Insight, & Concentration… If, for some reason, it becomes obsessive, then you have to turn and look at it. “Okay, why would the mind go for this? What does it like about it?” Sometimes it’ll lie to itself about the reason; sometimes it’ll tell the truth. But when you can see the allure, and you can see then the drawbacks of following that allure, then …
- Patient & Inquisitive… As you think of the body in those ways, as you hold that perception in mind, gradually things do begin to connect, and the breath does become calmer. Then think of the breath moving through the body faster than you ordinarily think it does. I know some people who say they try to breathe in, and before they’ve even got the breath down …
- Resourceful… This becomes your entertainment. Like the image of the elephant: The pleasure and rapture of jhana are your pleasure that corresponds to the pleasure the elephant finds by scratching himself with a branch. This is how you allay your itch. It’s a safe pleasure in the sense that it doesn’t cloud up your mind. And it doesn’t get you in debt …
- Hold a Mirror to Your Mind… That becomes your foundation. When that foundation is strong, then you can start asking the other questions, which are, “How are my feelings and perceptions shaping my mind?” In other words, “How does that feeling of pain make inroads into the mind, and what role does perception play in that?” Ajaan MahaBoowa gives a lot of interesting reflections on this: How do you perceive …
- The Creator of Worlds… what they call bhava or becoming. When they deliver you back to the bus station, you hop on the next bus. Sometimes they don’t even deliver you back here. You just go from one bus to the next to the next and you end up in Nevada, Nebraska, the Northwest Territories. So come back to the bus station and clean it out, make …
- Training Your Intentions… If you don’t see them with this purpose, they’ll take over—they become the intentions that are dominant. After all, the mind is always dealing with intentions. Without intentions, as I said, there would be no experience of the present moment. No time, no space. So, as long as you’re intending, hold on to the best intentions you can find. Start …
- Delight in Concentration… You’re putting the mind in a world, in a state of becoming, where there is no Ajaan Mun, there is no Ajaan Lee, there’s no Buddha. Is that a good world to be in? You’re much better off when you’re in this world, where you can have a clear sense of what’s the right thing to do. After all …
- Gratitude & Trust… He says if your parents are stingy, you try to induce them to become more generous; if your parents are not virtuous, you try to induce them to be more virtuous; if they have no faith in the principle of action, you try to develop that sense of faith and conviction in them; and if they’re not wise, you try to teach them …
- The Buddha’s Cure… Try to figure out where they’re coming from until it becomes obvious that they’re coming from a lot of ignorance. As Ajaan Suwat says, it’s like shining a light in a dark cave. The darkness may have been there for a long, long time, but it can’t say that the light doesn’t have any right to come in. Once …
- Exercising the Mind… Your knowledge becomes skilled knowledge. In the old days, they used to make a distinction between warrior knowledge and scribe knowledge. Scribes could describe all kinds of things, define words, write about all kinds of things. Whereas with warriors, their knowledge didn’t come in terms of definitions. It came more in terms of skills, how you deal with a particular situation, how you …
- Strengthening Your Goodness… This helps make the breath become more comfortable. You’re not forcing it in ways that are unnatural, and you’re basically listening to what the body needs. If you want to be friends with the breath, it’s as with any friendship: You have to listen to the other person, observe, and then make whatever contributions you can make to make the other …
- Cooking the Mind… It’s not going to have the craving that would lead to more becoming. So you’re cooking your cravings. As with all cooking, some of the main principles are the same for everybody. You’re applying heat. That’s the effort; but some people are like eggs. Some people are like vegetables. Other people are like meat. They cook at different temperatures. And …
- Study & Practice… That’s when the Dhamma becomes your own. That’s when you really can say that you’re discerning. Otherwise, you just have the names of discernment, the ideas of discernment. But when you actually encounter what’s going on in your mind—both the good and the not-so-good things—and decide you’re not just going to sit there and allow …
- Guarding the Truth… If you filter things with knowledge, that becomes a path. These are the kinds of things you can know directly. Remember, the Buddha said you want to guard the truth. What that means is not necessarily going out and tracking down all the data you can get. It means being very clear about where you get your ideas and very clear about how you …
- Attached to the Body… Of course, the more concentrated you are, the more subtle the discernment becomes to pick up on these attachments, to pick up on the way the mind lies to itself. So the two qualities go hand-in-hand: tranquility and insight as a way of bringing the mind to freedom—so that it no longer has to be a slave to its ideas about …
- How to Look, How to Listen… But if you bring some knowledge to the process, then the fabrication becomes part of the path. So. Look inwards. Listen inwards. Make this your primary focus, and that’ll solve a lot of problems, both inside and out.
- Feeding Instructions… But then when things are well adjusted, there seems to be a melding as your awareness and the breath become one. Sometimes you have to stay there for long periods of time, but ultimately they will separate out on their own—the awareness and the breath—but not where you might expect the dividing line to be. Then you can focus on consciousness itself …
- The Radiant Mind… The important point is that you become conscious of the fact that you are making choices. You want to be alert to see when the choice is made, what kind of discussion goes into it, and then the results of following through with that choice. That ability to step back and watch these things: That’s the brightness of the mind. That’s what …
- Make the Most of This Breath… In this way, this habit you develop of being really scrupulous in how you talk—saying things that are true, beneficial and timely—helps you become more true, beneficial, and timely in how you observe what’s going on in the mind. It’s interesting that when the Buddha sets out the various combinations of true and false, beneficial and unbeneficial, timely and untimely …
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