Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 113
  2. The Need for Agency
     … You already have a you; all he’s asking is that whatever “you” you have, it’s part of a state of becoming you’ve developed, so train it to be competent, train it to be confident that you can do this. That’s what the teachings on conceit that Ven. Ananda once gave to that nun are all about: “Other people can do … 
  3. Truth Without Air Quotes
     … The Buddha’s trying to get us to see these things simply as processes, rather than in terms of what their content might be, because these are the same processes by which we create an emotion, we create a state of becoming. The emotion has a meaning, it has a content, but here we’re trying to stay away from the content and to … 
  4. The Breath All the Way
     … When you can be sensitive to these variations in the breath, the Buddha gets you to become more actively involved in the breathing process. You train yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, aware of the whole body as you breathe out. This requires some skill and practice, for you have to learn how to expand your sense of … 
  5. Trust in Heedfulness
    Trust in Heedfulness May 25, 2004 The Buddha’s last words were to become consummate through heedfulness. Being consummate, of course, means developing the path to its fullness, so that it can take you all the way to release. And the way to do that, he said, is through being heedful. The Pali word is appamadena. It’s interesting, that word “heedful.” It’s … 
  6. Wisdom for Dummies Revisited
     … That becomes your incentive to get up early the next morning and to try it again. The other basic role of wisdom is that when things go wrong, when things don’t go well in life, you learn to give yourself pep talks. This can apply to the meditation: Everyone is going to have barren stretches in the meditation. It’s common. There are … 
  7. Trading Up
     … Then eventually the rapture becomes unpleasant, maybe even disturbing—because your sensitivity has grown greater, so that what seemed really nice to begin with is now not so nice after all. There will be something quieter, something better. Even the pleasure that fills the body, that’s gross too. As you let go of these things as they seem gross, the mind reaches a … 
  8. Anxiety
     … And as we learn to work with these things, we’re giving ourselves hands-on experience with the way we create any emotional state, any state of becoming. It’s composed of these same three things. And when you get experience with this in your meditation, then you can deal with other states as they arise throughout the day. For example, you have an … 
  9. Dharma Medicine
     … You’re learning to become a doctor for your own mind. The medicines are all laid out. First you want to make sure they are genuine medicines, that they’re true. Then secondly, are they beneficial for you? And then thirdly, is this the right time for them? Try to get a sense through practice of which perceptions, which ways of looking at things … 
  10. Dhamma Medicine
     … That’s how you become a wise doctor of the mind. After all, there are lots of medicines in Dhamma, and you always want to make sure to use the right one—and to use it skillfully. Some of these teachings are really basic. They’re simple enough for kids to understand, yet we often forget them or bypass them, wanting to go for … 
  11. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
     … What would it be like if you didn’t have to suffer from these things? What would that mean? How would you go about that? That becomes the focus of your practice. If you believe it’s simply a matter of accepting what’s there as a given that you can’t change, that totally limits the way you might practice. Or if you … 
  12. Exploring What You’ve Got
     … That not only helps balance your sense of the body but also opens up your awareness so that it becomes a broader awareness. We want the mind to be centered but we also want to have a sense of awareness that’s broad and doesn’t feel constricted. The less sense of constriction you have, the easier it is to stay here. So these … 
  13. Why Train the Mind
     … It allows the breath to become a whole-body process, opening up parts of the body that were starved of breath energy before. It makes the mind feel less confined. If you find it difficult to be aware of the whole body all at once, you might go through the body section by section first. Start down around the navel or anywhere else you … 
  14. A Meditative Life
     … And when these principles become precepts — in other words, promises to yourself that you keep in all circumstances — the Buddha says that you’re giving unlimited protection, unlimited safety to other beings, and you have a share in that safety, a share in that protection yourself. So the precepts create an environment where there’s more protection. When there’s more protection, it’s … 
  15. Stepping Out of Yourself
     … And in stepping out, you become free.
  16. The Little Things
     … We don’t want to act in ways where we become our own worst enemy. We don’t want to act in ways that’ll eat away at us later. So we pay attention to what we’re doing, pay attention to our intentions. Any idea that comes up, any motivation that comes up that you don’t feel good about, you don’t … 
  17. Things Aren’t as They Should Be
     … But that term that’s usually translated as, “knowledge and vision of the way things are”—yathā-bhūta-ñāṇa-dassana—really means knowledge and visions of how things become: in other words, understanding the process of causality. Meditation is not just simply a matter of watching. You’re doing something, or as the Buddha says, you commit and then you reflect. You’re learning … 
  18. The Context for No Context
     … In this way our mutual presence becomes admirable friendship, which helps us in the practice. So you want to help create an ideal environment for the practice, and then use that environment to strengthen the mind so ultimately it doesn’t have to depend on a particular environment, a particular context. You can meditate anywhere regardless of the situation. This is a really necessary … 
  19. The Pain of Conviction
     … You can be exposed to any amount of Dhamma, and yet if there’s no sense that there’s anything wrong in your current state of becoming—the current you in your current sense of the world—you’re not going to hear the Dhamma at all. Or what you hear is something else. I’ve had it happen again and again, people coming … 
  20. Top Priorities
     … This is how the perfections become perfect. This is how they take top priority. As we follow through with that determination, there are four qualities that the Buddha lists as going together with determination. The first is discernment, learning to see what’s important, learning to see clearly what has to be done to get to what’s important: understanding the path, what has … 
  21. Alone with Your Mind
     … Often it becomes our enemy. It’s wandering off, worrying about this, wondering about that, thinking about the past, regretting this, regretting that. It’s another one of those companions you don’t want when you find yourself alone with the mind. You want to be able to turn off unskillful thoughts and replace them with more skillful ones. In some cases, this means … 
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