Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 111
  2. Chopping Off Thoughts
     … Then, from that vantage point, all the other issues in the mind that have you mystified will become clear. Why is it that you say things and do things and think things that are harmful? Things that cause you suffering? Everybody wants happiness, and yet we do things that cause suffering: Why is that? This is where you’ve got to look. You’re … 
  3. Strength for Your Goodness
     … When you can develop a sense of well-being simply by the way you breathe, you become more independent from things outside. The pleasures you used to really need, you find you don’t need them so much anymore because you’ve just got something better inside. When the mind is well-fed like this, then it’s going to pursue that process of … 
  4. A Good Place to Not-Self
     … In fact, the Buddha says, actions can become so skillful that you get to the point where you find something that doesn’t age, doesn’t grow ill, doesn’t die. So where do your actions come from? They come from the mind. Those chants simply remind us that if you’re looking for happiness, you have to look at the causes and not … 
  5. Gladdening
     … When things become clear like this, there’s a part of the mind that really responds with joy to that clarity. I was reading a while back someone talking about how he didn’t like a lot of the Buddha’s teaching on rebirth and karma because it had left no mystery in life—as if mystery were what we wanted. There are a … 
  6. One Step at a Time
     … Learn to use these things properly and they all become part of the path.
  7. How to Talk to Yourself
     … This can become a factor of jhāna, or mental absorption, when the mind gets really well-concentrated in the first stage. When we hear that it’s a factor of jhana, it sounds kind of exotic, but it’s actually simply a matter of learning how to talk to yourself well, in an effective way to get the mind to settle down. So much … 
  8. Locate Your Craving
     … That way of breathing becomes habitual, gets associated with the desire, and feels uncomfortable. That’s actually what you’ve got to get out of your system: that uncomfortable breathing. Well, you can do that with the breath, the lessons you learn in calming the breath, adjusting the breath. You don’t need to give in to the desire. So, you want to see … 
  9. A Sense of Yourself
     … That’s where it becomes a skill. As the Buddha said, how do you develop mindfulness? You practice all the factors of the eightfold path. There’s a belief in some places that there’s the path of mindfulness that leads to awakening, and a separate path of concentration that leads to awakening. The path bifurcates, and although either fork takes you to the … 
  10. Parsing Out Suffering
     … As the Buddha said, once you become a being, you have to feed. That’s something we all have in common. We’re all looking for pleasure, a pleasure that comes from feeding, but we tend to focus on different aspects of it. We’re not focused only on the pleasant feeling of fullness that comes when the food is down in the stomach … 
  11. Useful Thinking
     … When you develop that skill, your powers of thought become an aid to release.
  12. Responsible for Your Goodness
     … That energy becomes the medium through which you experience every other aspect of the body. When that sense of well-being nourishes the mind, you’re in a much better position to look at your own drawbacks and not get ensnared in all the stories and back-and-forth recriminations that usually build up when you notice you’ve been doing something unskillful. That … 
  13. An Inner Revolution
     … The thinking gets more refined until it becomes just one little thought, one little perception of “breath, breath, breath.” And the breath itself gets more and more calm. At first it’s quite strong as you get the bodily energy worked up a bit, energized a bit. But then you calm things down. It calm down even to the point where the breath stops … 
  14. Skills for Living & Dying
     … the various states of becoming where you could go. Then you can realize, okay, some of them are not desirable. They’re not going to be good for the practice. Make up your mind, “If I have to go, I’ll go only someplace where it’s possible to keep on practicing.” The deva levels and the human levels: Those are the levels where … 
  15. Active Truth
     … You become more and more skillful, create less and less suffering for yourself and others. That’s how the Buddha proves the principle of action, proves the principle of karma. He doesn’t cite his own memories of previous lifetimes or proof that someone can have a consciousness that goes from one life to the next and then remember what had happened in previous … 
  16. Old Kamma & New
     … Otherwise, it just becomes one more place for you to stop off in your daily rounds. The right intention is your intention to stay here. That’s the kamma in your meditation. We don’t usually think about meditation as kamma, but that’s what it is. It’s good kamma. A lot of our connotations around the word kamma are negative. We think … 
  17. Admit Your Stupidity
     … Of course, the discernment there becomes the internal quality, what the Buddha calls appropriate attention. It’s a matter of asking the right questions, questions that help you understand where you’re creating unnecessary suffering and how you can put an end to that. That, for the Buddha, was the big issue in life, the big issue he wanted to address after his awakening … 
  18. The Fangs of Conceit
     … In that way, this quality of conceit actually becomes a help in the practice, and you’re able to avoid its fangs.
  19. Tools of Perception
     … Or when you leave home and come to the monastery, the issues of home get further and further away, to the point where they become strange. You wonder, “Why would I ever get tied up in those issues?” Well, they were around you all the time, and you focused on them all the time, so they seemed natural. But when your surroundings are not … 
  20. Into the Cave with the Tiger
     … And, who knows what had been going on in their minds? When you sit down, and the mind won’t settle down because it has thoughts that you’re not particularly proud of, meditation does become a grim process. But if you look at the thoughts and they’re enjoyable thoughts, honorable thoughts, thoughts you can be proud of, thoughts that lift up your … 
  21. The Art of Right Speech
     … You focus on one aspect of the path and it starts connecting with another aspect—this factor, that factor, the factors all become one. And that’s when the path can yield its full results—which go beyond the path. When you think about what might go beyond the path, you’re opening your mind to other possibilities that you might normally have thought … 
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