Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 115
  2. Overwhelmed by Freedom
     … Your mind, which is normally very active and proactive, becomes passive, loses its direction. This is why the Buddha’s perspectives on karma, his perspectives on time in the world, are an important part of the practice. There are no passages in his teachings that are there just for abstract speculation. They’re all part of the training. He talks about eons of time … 
  3. Common Sense
     … When you’re dealing within the mind, nobody else can come in and rearrange the furniture and point out to you, “Well, this has to be this way and that has to be that.” You can get instructions from the outside, there are hints and directions, but as for what you’re actually going to see and how sensitive and how skillful you become … 
  4. A Good Place to Stay
     … As you get more sensitive to the breath, it becomes a mirror for the mind. You can begin to see thoughts as they’re just beginning to appear. You notice them as a little stirring in one part of the breath energy in the body, and then a perception gets slapped onto it: “This is a thought about this; that’s a thought about … 
  5. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … It’s through living in line with the customs of the noble ones that you become noble, too.
  6. Four Bases of Success
     … As you become more reliable inside, other people can come to rely on you, too. You have more to offer the world. So, it’s an act of kindness to be meditating. And if you’ve been meditating for a long while, you might use what the Buddha calls a healthy sense of shame. Ajaan Lee made a nice comment one time. He said … 
  7. The Skill of Letting Go
     … But as the Buddha said, just as a little tiny bit of excrement smells, he wouldn’t praise even a tiny bit of becoming. So if you take this to heart, then eventually you’re going to have to let go of everything—but before that, you have to learn how to let go. You let go in bits and pieces as you’re … 
  8. Motivation
     … That really oppressive mind state, that really oppressive state of becoming that they’d been maintaining, had gotten so heavy and so unbearable and so unmaintainable that they just finally dropped it and experienced a great release. But the question is, what did they awaken to? When the Buddha awakened, he awakened to understandings about intention, action, cause and effect, skillfulness, lack of skill … 
  9. Battling Negativity
     … As the Buddha says, you learn how to breathe in different ways so that the breath becomes an ally in your battle with negative mind-states. You learn how to breathe aware of the whole body. You learn how to calm the sensations of breathing in the body so that there’s a sense of ease and refreshment every time you breathe. That right … 
  10. A Strong Mind
     … It becomes your second nature. After all, as you’re meditating, what are you doing? You’re learning to look at things in the mind in terms of cause and effect, watching which actions lead to stress and which ones don’t. As aging, illness and death come creeping in, you can take that same approach: Look for your actions. What are you doing … 
  11. Take Time to Evaluate Your Life
     … At the same time, it means that the breath becomes an object that fills your sense of the body. As you breathe in, it feels like the breath is coming in and out through every pore. All the breath channels are getting connected. Once you’ve got those three factors going, you’ve got, on the one hand, the elements of tranquility in the … 
  12. Getting Back on Your Feet
     … Look at the country we have now, where people are getting cynical about all kinds of things, and they themselves become worse as a result. There’s no sense of honor, justice, or integrity at all. All they look at is seeing other people having no integrity, and so they say, “What the hell?” So for the sake of your own goodness, you can … 
  13. Hold on for All You’re Worth
     … This is how the Buddha’s insight becomes your insight, because you’ve created the conditions inside your own mind by mastering your own mind. So whatever things you need to hold onto in the meantime, hold onto them. Don’t let them go. Have that sense of confidence. Have that sense of capability. Have the sense of desire that wants to do this … 
  14. Willing to Learn
     … In either case, the gratification of the ego becomes the important issue, and not the actual learning of something new. How does this breath meditation work? How can you get yourself to sit for longer periods of time? How can you deal with this particular defilement in the mind? These are some of the things you want to learn. If one approach doesn’t … 
  15. Accepting the Way Out
     … This is why we practice with the breath so much, so that it becomes second nature: As soon as something comes up, you check the breath. If the breath doesn’t feel good, you can change it. Then there’s verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself about the issue at hand. That’s tied in with mental fabrication, your feelings and your … 
  16. Getting Yourself
     … There have been people in the past who were a lot worse off than you are now, and yet they were able to become noble disciples. These are a few areas where comparing yourself with other people can be useful. But you have to be careful, that you don’t read the “I am” into it, or the “they are” into it as in … 
  17. Bless Yourself
     … You realize that there are good people in the world who have left their goodness behind, along with instructions on how to become good like them. Those instructions have lasted more than 2,500 years. So let that thought calm you down, at the same time making you want to practice. This is a large part of the strength of persistence: learning how to … 
  18. The Unity of the Path
     … They really do become one. But even in the beginning when you start out practicing, you often see that there’s a smooth progression. It’s not one step and then another step, but it’s one step and then that first step gets included in the next and both of them get included in the next, spreading out their influence. They all flow … 
  19. The Battle of Your Selves
     … As the Buddha said, once you become a being you have to feed. This is why some of our sense of ourselves as beings center on feeding. And it’s seeing all these different selves, all these different beings that we identify with, seeing them struggle: That’s what gives you a chance to get out of them. If you were just one you … 
  20. The Truth of Transcendence
     … So there’s a danger, there are drawbacks to even the good rewards that you would gain from generosity and virtue as you wander through various states of being and becoming. It was after coming to these drawbacks that the Buddha would talk about the rewards of renunciation, looking for a higher happiness, trading in the happiness that comes from generosity and virtue for … 
  21. Heedful, Ardent, & Resolute
     … And we let that encourage us to develop the qualities that enable us to become our own refuge. We really can depend on our minds to act in a way that delivers the happiness we all want deep down inside. A happiness that won’t change on us. A happiness that will never disappoint.
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