Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 117
  2. Breathing to Awakening
     … But then, as the mind begins to settle in and becomes more and more at one with the breath, you move from calm to concentration, and this is where things begin to seem really strong and solid inside. You maintain that balanced focus, because, at this point, you’re no longer engaged in the directed thought and evaluation that are involved in analysis of … 
  3. Habits of Perception
     … Once we place our faith in these perceptions, we become a slave to them. Our idea of objective reality places a lot of imperatives on us. Our idea of who we are places a lot of imperatives on us, and these are the imperatives that make us suffer. So the Buddha teaches us to learn how to question those perceptions. There’s a passage … 
  4. Fully Here
     … It becomes a subconscious process. So one way of bringing it back into consciousness is to ask yourself that question: What direction does the energy go when you breathe in? Does the energy in the body feel coordinated? Or does one part seem to be fighting against another part? Centuries ago, there was a Japanese master, Hakuin, who suffered from what he called Zen … 
  5. Strong Through Commitment
     … It becomes part of the path to the end of suffering, which is what we’re here for. It’s just a question of really committing yourself and making it stick. There will be struggles. There will be parts of the mind that really like having power and don’t like to have their power challenged. But why should you give in to them … 
  6. All Four Tetrads at Once
     … You want to be aware of all these facets, because only then does your vision becomes all-around. We’re students of the Buddha, who was said to have an all-around eye. He saw things from all angles, reflected on things from all sides. That was what enabled him to find a release that was total: release all-around. As he said, his … 
  7. To Discern Suffering
     … If something seems to work, that becomes a habit. Some of these habits go way back to that time even before we understood language. This is why when you ask questions about physical pain, sometimes it’s good to ask questions that sound very strange. Which side of the pain are you on? Exactly which pattern of tension is keeping the pain within limits … 
  8. Choosing Freedom
     … It’s easy, once concentration does become stable, to get complacent. You start wandering around thinking about other things that come back and eat up your concentration. So you have to be careful. There are qualities you have to develop, qualities that you have to abandon. So you watch to see what needs to be done. That’s how the discernment gets developed. Ultimately … 
  9. Stay
     … You’re right at the surface of the mind, looking at its movements as they’re happening, and this way the details of its behavior become clear. Where do you think the Buddha learned dependent co-arising and all those other subtle teachings? Looking right at the surface movements of the mind. They’re all here, but we’re too busy looking past them … 
  10. Happy to Be Here
     … You move your focus in so that the fit between the mind and the breath becomes a nice snug fit. It feels really good to be here. This feels like the right place to be. And any random thoughts that might come up and pull you away, you’ve already dealt with the main topics: i.e., sensuality, ill will, harmfulness. So why go … 
  11. Dedicating Merit
     … But in general, when they know that someone has dedicated merit to them, whether it’s specifically to them as individuals or as a class, and if they appreciate it, their appreciation for that goodness becomes their goodness now. That’s how they gain merit. They actually feed off of that. Just as the radiant gods feed off of rapture, the hungry ghosts feed … 
  12. Cutting the Fetters
     … Sometimes the act of cutting is presented as a gradual process where, over time, you become more and more convinced of the truth of the Buddha’s teachings, and that cuts through a lot of your false social conditioning. In fact, we’re told that the first three fetters are all the result of artificial social conditioning. The creation of a sense of “I … 
  13. You Are Not Powerless
     … That becomes your perfection of generosity. And that’s yours, something that even death can’t take away. Finally, there’s discernment, penetrating discernment, as the Buddha said, into what arises and passes away, what’s originated and what passes away. The “penetrating” means that you realize that things can pass away and arise, but some things, when they arise, are better than others … 
  14. Diagnosing the Mind
     … This way, you learn how to become your own doctor. There’s nobody who can stand over your shoulder and say, “Now you breathe this way, now you breathe that way, now you focus on this, you’d better drop that.” If there were somebody doing that and they were accurate, they would scare you—that somebody could read your mind that accurately. What … 
  15. A Rite of Passage
     … It comes from developing your internal resources in a way where you become more generous, more virtuous, wiser. It’s all to the good. Then you can start questioning all the other voices that pull in other directions and say, “What do they know?” For me, that was one of the big turnarounds in my practice while I was in Thailand. I was practicing … 
  16. Blessings
     … It doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it clears the decks so that this becomes your place to stay. Whatever comes up, you can see it coming from a far distance away. It’s a much safer place to be. That way, when the mind does get distracted, you can start asking questions about it because you know you’ve got a better … 
  17. Accepting the Way Things Function
     … Right resolve, which is one of the discernment factors, then becomes part of the concentration factor. This confirms something that Ajaan Lee said, which is that when you’re getting the mind to settle down, directed thought and evaluation are a function of discernment as you’re trying to figure out what the mind needs in order to get it to settle down. When … 
  18. Appropriate Attention
     … In other words, it becomes a guide for ardency so that you really can put an end to the ways you’re causing suffering for yourself. Similarly with the factors for awakening, which are qualities that correspond to the path: Those are things that you want to use appropriate attention to develop. And what does develop mindfulness? What develops analysis of qualities? One of … 
  19. Respect for Happiness
     … So you become your own best friend. This is a problem with a lot of us. We’re often our own worst enemy, doing things to ourselves that we’d never stand to have anybody else do to us. And yet, because we’re the ones who are doing it, we let it happen. So of course, we’re going to make mistakes. But … 
  20. The Kamma of Concentration
     … Otherwise you hit some non-dual states and you think you’ve become one with the non-duality at the basis of all reality. And then you get stuck. But if you see that even “non-dual” is a perception, a fabrication, an action, then you can take it apart. So the teachings on action, on kamma, are directly relevant to how we meditate … 
  21. Emotion
     … That way, you can get a clear handle on your emotions so that they can become a very helpful part of the path.
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