Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 17
  2. Vows
     … When the going gets tough, how do you keep going? How do you talk yourself into staying encouraged? In other words, how do you become your own best friend? How do you become your own teacher? How do you learn the strategies for training yourself so that you really do grow in the practice? This is important to remember. When the Buddha was teaching … 
  3. Kindness in the Light of Karma
     … Have another chocolate.” From there, the idea of being kind to others becomes basically indulging them, doing things they like. But if you think in terms of karma, kindness is something else. Being kind to yourself means looking at your thoughts, looking at your actions, and figuring out where they’re still lacking in skill, so that you can do something about it. A … 
  4. The Three Perceptions & Their Opposites
     … But you’re going to try to work with the breath so that it does become more constant. The mind’s concentration becomes more constant. There’s a sense of ease in body and mind, and you gain some mastery over it. So there you are: constant, easeful, under your control. Now, eventually, you’re going to have to let go of the concentration … 
  5. A Heart Set on Goodwill
     … That way you’ll get to become king, and I’ll get to become Buddha.” When the prince tried to kill his father, the father found out why, and so he handed the kingdom over to him. But then the prince didn’t trust him and he ended up putting his father to death. So now he was a king who had conspired against … 
  6. Responsible Happiness
     … If you do it with wisdom and heedfulness—in other words, thinking about the long-term—it can actually become a happiness that spreads around. After all, we’re not going to become happy meditating and then being mean and stingy in daily life. Part of the practice is also being generous and being virtuous. This is the kind of happiness that helps to … 
  7. The Uses of Equanimity
     … Train yourself to become sensitive to where there’s pleasure, to where there’s a sense of refreshment or rapture in the breathing. Notice how these feelings have an effect on the mind and then allow them to grow calm.” What this means is that, building on equanimity and patience, you become proactive. In other words, the equanimity and patience are designed to make … 
  8. High Level Metta
     … But if you do them with knowledge, they actually become part of the path. What are they? To begin with, we’ve got the breath, which is bodily fabrication. Well, that’s right here. It’s coming in and going out right now. It’s a fabrication in the sense that you can shape it with your intentions. You can breathe in different ways … 
  9. Attahi Attano Natho
     … In this way, you become more and more independent. You become your own mainstay. There’s a saying in the Buddha’s teachings: *Attahi attano natho, *the self is its own mainstay. But it can be your mainstay only if you develop the resources you’ve got inside. So that’s what we’re doing here. We’re developing an internal food source. It … 
  10. Pain & Distraction
     … This is the process of what they call becoming and then birth. Becoming is when visions appear in the mind, whole worlds, and they’re not limited to visual visions, they can also be the worlds of pain. All the perceptions and ideas you have around a pain can suck you into a little world of their own. You want to be in a … 
  11. Birth Is Suffering
     … That becomes the focal point for another becoming. It goes on and on and on. So you’ve got to learn how to think in ways that get you out. For instance, the Buddha says when someone misbehaves, our ordinary reaction is anger. But he says the proper reaction is compassion. You should want for that person or that being to have some happiness … 
  12. Basics
     … Once you focus your desire properly, it becomes an aid to the meditation and not an obstacle. The same goes for the other qualities. Sometimes your effort can push, push, push so hard that it gets in the way of any kind of progress. So step back. Then it doesn’t become a matter of not pushing; you just learn where to push — what … 
  13. Ways to Think
     … As the Buddha said, when you reflect in this way it’s not just a matter of becoming heedful. You develop a sense of samvega, that no matter where you might go in this universe, no matter what you do, no matter how good things can get in life, these things always lie in wait. You can become a deva, you can become a … 
  14. Analyzing Results
     … And the meditation does become more of a skill. This is how you become more and more your own teacher, observing what’s working and what’s not, what needs to be done, what needs to be dropped, because no one else can peer into your mind to tell you. Even people who can read your mind can’t necessarily tell what’s going … 
  15. Your Inner Teacher
     … When you make yourself a more reliable observer in this way, you become a more reliable person. And you become a more reliable teacher for yourself. It’s when you can become a reliable teacher for yourself: That’s when you can be a help to other people as well. But it’s got to start from within.
  16. Right Fear
     … Someone once wrote a piece stating that everybody now has become a salesman or a saleswoman. We’re always pushing something, always hyping something. Even religious teachers are basically salesmen. The teaching on skillful means, for example, has basically become a teaching to justify all kinds of ways of changing the Dhamma in order to please people. And what you end up doing is … 
  17. Refuge
     … Once you’ve established this toehold right here, its influence is going to spread, so that it becomes more than just a toehold. It becomes a total, solid foundation so that the mind as a whole becomes your true refuge.
  18. Unfabricated Happiness
     … If you fabricate with knowledge, that fabrication and everything following from it will become a path to the end of suffering. The more sensitive you become as you fabricate a good path here—in other words, a good state of concentration, mindful, alert, ardent—the more you can develop a sense of ease that you can spread through the body. You get a sense … 
  19. Clinging & the End of Clinging
     … Suffering and the cause of suffering as truths are not noble in themselves, but when you view them from the right perspective and you follow the duties that are appropriate for those truths—in other words, comprehending the suffering and abandoning the craving—then those truths become noble. You become noble. And you progress on the noble path.
  20. Asalha Puja
     … But there was a Brahma who read what was going on in the Buddha’s mind and he was concerned—after all, the Buddha had gone to all that trouble to become Buddha and here he was going to give up on teaching—so he came down and invited the Buddha, saying, “There are beings with little dust in their eyes: They will understand … 
  21. The Buddha’s Shoulds
     … In other words, concentration on its own is a state of becoming that’s useful on the path. Even though you eventually want to go beyond all states of becoming, if you don’t first master this state of becoming you’ll be wandering around in other states of becoming where it would be hard to see what’s going on in the mind … 
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