Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 104
  2. Training the Mind
     … It’s is in this way that our happiness becomes secure. We can rely on it because we’ve learned how to rely on ourselves—the way we process information and the skills that we’ve developed in the mind. They start with simple things like this: being able to stay with one thing and make the most of it. After all, what could … 
  3. Facing Pain Straight On
     … You also gain insight into how you can train the mind to be observant, to ask questions about cause and effect, and to watch and experiment and become more skillful as you approach the issue of suffering and pain in your life. This is one of things that was really distinctive about the Buddha’s teachings. You look at the teachings that were taught … 
  4. The Desire to End All Desires
     … When you focus your desire there, it becomes an integral part of getting to the point where you don’t need desire anymore.
  5. Attachment to Views
     … This is where the issue of non-attachment to views actually becomes total non-attachment. But even then, as we see in the case of the Buddha, he would teach other people how to use the raft, what worked and what didn’t, and how to make a raft for themselves. That’s not called attachment to views, that’s called skillful use of … 
  6. The Mind Comes First
     … That will become your reminder. When unskillful thoughts come up, you can remind yourself, “Okay, one of the ways of undercutting them is to turn around, look at the breath again.” Drop whatever that frame of reference was, and re-establish yourself from the frame of reference here at the breath. Then there are the images you hold in mind. Those sometimes lie behind … 
  7. Five Steps to Insight
     … In this way, your concentration grows deeper because it becomes more and more resilient. You get quicker and quicker at seeing through the things that used to pull you away, until it feels like concentration is the normal state of the mind. You learn how to enjoy it. But then you begin to realize that it has its drawbacks, too. This is where you … 
  8. Flexibility
     … If you learn how to test them, getting a sense of time and place, that’s when you become skilled in the meditation. In Thailand they have the word diṭṭhi. It’s taken from the Pali word for view, opinion, but as it developed in Thai, it also means pride, conceit. That’s why we have to learn how to put our views aside … 
  9. Treating the Diseases of the Mind
     … Of the various objects, it has the most variety, in the sense that you can use it to wake yourself up; you can use it calm yourself down; you can use it as an object of concentration; you can use it as a basis for understanding the processes of fabrication that go on in the body and the mind, so that it becomes an … 
  10. Heedfulness All the Way Through
     … After all, when you’re in concentration, you’re in what the Buddha calls a state of becoming: You’ve assumed an identity in a world of experience. In this case, the world is the body you’re inhabiting, and you are the meditator. That’s how you got the mind to settle down. But now you’re going to use your discernment to … 
  11. Goodwill Without Limits
     … That then becomes your karma. So remember, you’re not doing it for them. You’re doing it primarily for yourself. The question of whether they deserve your goodwill or don’t deserve your goodwill shouldn’t come into the equation. Questions of deserving don’t matter right here, because if you’re going to be skillful only to people you feel deserve your … 
  12. Making an Effort
     … So in order to ensure the mind doesn’t become its own worst enemy, you’ve got to train it. This is what the right effort is all about. Once you have the desire, then you work on persistence: The practice is something you stick with over time. And as the formula also says, you “uphold your intent.” In other words, you keep focused … 
  13. How to Save the World
     … In this way, the meditation becomes not just a good place to rest the mind from time to time, but a center that you can use throughout life—and particularly to get to know what’s going on in the mind and to bring peace to all the warring factions inside you. As we were saying this morning, it’s as if there’s … 
  14. Fully Absorbed
     … Think of the awareness and the breath becoming one. They both fill the body together. You don’t have to do any adjusting at that point. You’re just right here with it. And you stay. Part of the mind will say, “Well, this is dumb,” and you have to say, “No, this is not dumb. This is a skill.” And it’ll argue … 
  15. sBeyond Acceptance
     … It becomes obvious that they’re stupid. It’s simply that you haven’t been paying careful attention, which is why that part of the mind gets away with doing what it wants. But there are other things in the mind where you give them your steady gaze and they stare right back. They’re not going to be embarrassed. That’s where you … 
  16. The Joy of Curiosity
     … Then you’ve got to figure out, “How do I just stay with the sensation of the breath so that the sense of the breath and the awareness in the body all seem to become one?” And when you’ve got that, how do you maintain it? That’s one thing you can try to figure out. Another thing, of course, is how to … 
  17. The Breath Soufflé
     … As you become more aware of the breathing energies in the different parts of the body, that moves you into the fourth step, which is to calm bodily fabrication. That can mean two things. One, you simply calm the rate of your breathing. Two, you calm the effect that the breathing has on your sensation of the body. And here if you’re aware … 
  18. Dreams & Voices
     … Every animal had a desire to become that kind of animal, so these are all possibilities of the mind—and your mind, too. There are lots and lots of things you have been and still could be. So you might use that thought to develop a sense of samvega. If you see yourself in a very poor position in a previous lifetime, you can … 
  19. The Not-Self Discourse
     … It’s in this point that the Buddha’s reflection becomes overwhelming. There’s no place to hang on. Anywhere. At all. Now, it depends on the listeners how far they’re willing to follow the Buddha here, if they’re still willing to let go, let go, let go of everything they can cast the mind to, seeing that the aggregates are not … 
  20. The Resolve to Let Go
     … But when it becomes obsessive, then it’s unhealthy. And again, it’s not helpful for the concentration, not helpful for getting the mind in a position where it can really can see things clearly for what they are. The same with doubt, uncertainty: We often have our reasons for liking to hold on to it. An unwillingness to commit. An unwillingness to change … 
  21. A Foundation for Restraint
     … And it’s because of that motivation that your restraint can become healthy.
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