Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 109
  2. Sources of Lasting Happiness
     … It’s a source for genuine happiness because once you train the mind, then it’s not going to become your enemy. All too often people, have pleasant situations in their lives but they can make themselves miserable. If things are not pleasant, they’re even more miserable. They keep piling on more and more suffering. When the Buddha talked about suffering as his … 
  3. Shelter
     … The mind is constantly fabricating things, constantly creating states of becoming. All the things that you read about in dependent co-arising are happening all the time. You have to pay careful attention, you have to look really carefully, if you’re going to see these things. Finally there’s the ability to analyze what’s going on—to clear away what’s unimportant … 
  4. A Divine Seat
     … Where are those potentials and how do you activate them? If you can get your imagination captured by this question, attracted by this question, so that you become inquisitive, that can fill up the space in the present moment so that random thoughts and old emotions don’t have an opening to come barging in. So take an interest in this. What kind of … 
  5. Determined to Make a Difference
     … He said that it was through reflecting on these teachings that he himself had decided to become a monk: The world is swept away, it does not endure; it offers no shelter, there’s no-one in charge; it has nothing of its own, one has to pass on leaving everything behind; but it’s insufficient, insatiable, a slave to craving. In other words … 
  6. Purity
     … If you don’t treat them well, that becomes your karma. That’s your lack of skill. So for your sake, you wish people well. And what does it mean to wish them well? Wish that they will behave in ways that lead to true happiness. Goodwill is not just a magic wand, where we say, “May everybody be happy,” and we sprinkle happiness … 
  7. Inner Discontent
     … This is when the meditation becomes a lifelong project. If you’re doing it just for a weekend or two, you simply listen to instructions and try to follow them through as best as you can. If things don’t work out, you can tell yourself that the instructions weren’t all that good. You go looking for another teacher, another practice. But when … 
  8. A Game of Chess
     … We tend to forget, though, that this was delivered to people who’d already become stream-enterers, who already had a good foundation in the practice. That’s when they let go of everything. But in the meantime, you’ve got to take those khandhas and convert them into the path. You look at the different factors in the path. Take right concentration, for … 
  9. The Burning House
     … And, as life goes on, this awareness right here with the body is going to become a bigger and bigger issue. As the body begins to break down, illness comes, pain comes. Soon you find yourself less and less able to do things you used to be able to do before. The mind gets more and more roped into being here, much against its … 
  10. Turning Points
     … So his tack is to take that desire for happiness, not to try to snuff it out the way he did when he was practicing his austerities, but to train it so that it becomes a noble desire for happiness, part of the path called the noble path. As the Buddha said, it leads to unbinding, which in his day was a common word … 
  11. Investing in Noble Wealth
     … It becomes a really comfortable mind to be in. It’s not narrow and constantly worried about not having enough money, not having enough status, whatever. There’s room in that expansive quality that comes with generosity. It’s like giving the mind a large home. It can move around with plenty of room. When you have these qualities developed in the mind, they … 
  12. Discernment on the Path
    There was an ajaan in Thailand who didn’t become famous until very late in his life. He gave very short Dhamma talks, and one of the talks he gave was basically one sentence. He said, “Take buddho as the path for the mind." Buddho is the meditation topic he worked with, but the same principle applies to the breath or whatever other topic … 
  13. There’s Work to Be Done
     … You can continue this survey again and again until you’re ready to settle down because now you’ve become familiar with the breathing in the different parts of the body. You’ve gained a sense of what can be connected and what’s not yet connected. Then you want to think about putting it all together so that the whole body’s breathing … 
  14. Don’t Hang Around Your Corpse
     … Why does the mind play these tricks on itself? Something that looks really attractive in one context becomes unattractive in another context, and then back to attractive again in still another. What’s going on? The mind wants this to be attractive. For what purpose? Keep digging into those questions and you’ll learn a lot of interesting lessons about the mind. Because the … 
  15. The Mind Like Water
     … That’s where the discernment becomes useful, because when you figure that out, you begin to realize that this is where these streams and currents come from that keep the mind flowing along, flowing along. It’s only when you’ve cut the stream that the mind can be really still. This, of course, is where the analogies break down. If you find a … 
  16. Alternative Conceptions
     … And then the concentration then becomes a good basis for insight, not simply because it makes the mind still enough so that you can see, but also because, in the process of creating the concentration, you’ve learned a lot about how the mind puts things together. This is why the Buddha, when teaching meditation, simply said, “Go do jhāna.” He didn’t say … 
  17. Jhana: Responsible Happiness
     … Or as we see with a lot of Buddhist scholars, they don’t have any real concentration, so they say that concentration is self-indulgent; it’s not necessary; insight has to be strict and self-denying—and with that attitude, even the insight becomes harmful. It turns into a lot of wrong view. So the dangers of not having concentration are much greater … 
  18. The Swinging Balance
    The Swinging Balance March 10, 2011 When you focus on the present moment, you’re trying to become friends with it. Tell yourself that you’re going to focus on the breath and find a spot in the body where it’s comfortable to stay, where it feels easeful. This can be anywhere in the body—deep in the body, on the surface of … 
  19. Sense Pleasures & Sensuality
     … He called it not only the drawbacks, but also the degradation of sensuality—the fact that the mind becomes a slave to its sensuality and gets nothing of any value out of it. The Buddha gives lots of images to get you to think about the drawbacks of sensuality. First there are the examples: It’s because of sensuality that we have to work … 
  20. Large-hearted Goodness
     … The mind becomes a slave to the world, a slave to craving. And as the passage just now said, the world is really insufficient. There’s another passage where the Buddha said that even if it rained gold coins it wouldn’t be enough for the needs of the heart, the desires of the heart for the kind of food that the world can … 
  21. Contentment vs. Initiative
     … If there’s interest, every day becomes an enemy, taking a little bit more, a little bit more away from you. So you lead your life in line with what your earnings are. Finally, you have good friends, people whose values are in line with the Dhamma, so that you can pick up good habits from them. Avoid people who would lead you astray … 
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