Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Our Variegated Minds… You direct your thoughts repeatedly to the breath and you evaluate the breathing, so that it becomes more comfortable. In other words, you bring knowledge and awareness in terms of the four noble truths to the process of breathing: That’s the verbal fabrication. Mental fabrication is learning how to perceive the breath in such a way it becomes more and more of a …
- Adult Dhamma… Even when he was teaching children he taught them adult things, or basically how to become adults. The Novice’s Questions, for instance, start out with the big harsh fact of life: that all beings subsist on food. This fact is also the main proof against the idea of intelligent design. If there were intelligent design, we could all live off the dew every …
- The Equanimity that Doesn’t Give Up… You won’t become an artist unless you want to become an artist. You won’t succeed at accomplishing something unless you stick with the desire to keep at the causes. The path is a truth of the will. So the voices that encourage that kind of truth, that say you do have the potential, you do have what it takes within you to …
- Where the Mind & Body Meet… It’s a craving for becoming, becoming a form, the sense of the body as felt from within. It becomes a craving for the formless when you get into states of concentration that are more formless with a sense of space, a sense of simply being conscious of consciousness. Those, too, are types of becoming, and they’re fabricated. As long as the concentration …
- Taking Your Own Medicine… They start with sensual desire and states of becoming. Becoming is one of the those words we hear and we say, “What are they talking about?” States of becoming are the worlds the mind creates for itself. Artists are especially good at this. They can create whole worlds with, say, a musical composition, a novel, or a poem. But the Buddha points out that …
- Help Others, Help Your Mind… If we have just equanimity without the goodwill, we become indifferent, callous. We become apathetic. There’s that great story of the storm that went through Ajaan Chah’s monastery once. The next day, Ajaan Chah went around the monastery checking up on the damage, and he found one monk sitting in a hut with half the roof blown off. He asked the monk …
- Specifically… He was becoming a teenager, and lust and anger were becoming real problems. If he got angry at somebody, he’s just hit that person right away. She told me, “Tell him not to be angry.” I said, “You can’t tell somebody not to be angry. The first step is to say, ‘When you get angry, this is what you do.’” In his …
- In Terms of the Four Noble Truths… The stories you build around them, the sense of who you are that you build around them, the sense of the world that you build around them, all of which is called becoming: It becomes a burden. It becomes, to use Ajaan Mahaboowa’s phrase, a squeeze on the heart. And you want to see that, you want to appreciate that, detect it every …
- Doing… This is why all the forest ajaans say that when you actually get there, the question of self or not-self becomes irrelevant, because self and not-self are defined around control. And here, the issue of control or no control becomes irrelevant. This is why the Buddha focused so much attention on action, because it’s through looking at your own actions and …
- The Buddha Teaches a Yakkha… As for the Buddha’s final answer, that’s become a famous set of dhammas, or qualities. It’s listed in a Dhamma textbook in Thailand as a set of qualities appropriate for lay people, but they’re appropriate for everybody. The late king of Thailand, Rama IX, when they celebrated the 200th anniversary of the founding of Bangkok, gave a talk to the …
- Inner Critics… The whole point of this training, though, is that you ultimately become able to see for yourself; you become a more reliable observer. Both the French therapist and the Buddha saw the inner critic as someone who was always willing to give you a free pass, or at least would give you a free pass on some really important things where you didn’t …
- The Skills of Truth & Calm… Remember the Buddha said that our trouble is that we have cravings that lead to becoming. With every problem that comes up to us—about what we want, about what we don’t want—we create a state of becoming around it. We’re like beavers. Whatever the problem facing the beaver, his solution is one thing: build a dam to make a lake …
- A Refuge from the Winds of the World… So in putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world, it’s not that we become uncaring. It’s just that we make our minds more stable. And then when we’re stable, we’re able to provide a lot more for other people. Of course, we’re born into the world with a lot of needs. This is why we have …
- Death Without Drama… We try to get at our experience of the body, feelings, and mind before they’ve turned into becomings. When they’re still just a potential for a becoming with narratives, we turn them into a becoming with concentration, which doesn’t have narratives. If you were to be asked, “What was the narrative of your concentration today?” the answer would be, “Well, I …
- A Home of Your Own… Because those things become the quality of the mind. They’re embedded within it. So what kind of actions do you want to take with you to make a long-lasting fixture in your home? You want them to be acts of generosity, acts of virtue, acts of discernment. Those are the best things for decorating your house inside. With them, it becomes easier …
- Clinging, Addictions, Obsessions… who you are; what kind of person looks for food in a certain way; what kind of person eats certain kinds of food; what kind of person is going to be benefiting from the food; what kind of person you’re going to become as a result of eating in a certain way. We’re all very much attached to these things. You see …
- When the Mind Is Still… You’re learning about becoming. Becoming is taking on an identity in the world of experience. Our major becoming, of course, is our identity as human beings in this human world. But there are also becomings in the mind and they happen all the time. A thought comes up, it looks appealing, it looks intriguing, it has some allure of some kind. Even if …
- Circumspection… How does it do that? As I said earlier, the mind is constantly engaging in becoming. When you’re practicing mindfulness, there’s a level of becoming right there. When you’re practicing concentration, there’s a level of becoming right there. You create these worlds out of the raw material of your physical sensations and mental activities, and doing this involves blocking out …
- Self-Reliance… This is how you become your own mainstay. Because there is that principle in the practice: “The self is its own mainstay. Who else could your mainstay be?” Who else could you depend on to become more skillful? You’ve got to learn how to do it yourself. You learn ideas of how to be skillful, suggested techniques in Dhamma talks, in books, but …
- Addictive Thinking… It takes a while for your center of gravity to shift so that the state of concentration does become more normal. The state of being in the present moment, mindful and alert, becomes more normal. If you ever worked on a physical skill—sports, carpentry, music—you know that originally, the moments where everything just seems to come together are few and far between …
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