Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. The Path Is and Isn’t the Goal
     … This ticket out becomes more appealing. It’s not the little ragged piece of paper that it looked like in the beginning. There’s a sense of rapture that you can develop here, a sense of ease, a sense of inner stability, inner solidity. And this is still just the path. Now, there will come a point where you have to let this go … 
  3. Right Resolve & Right Speech
     … Or, it’ll tell you that you don’t have any talent—you don’t have any hope of becoming a good meditator. Craving can tell you all kinds of things to divide you from what will be your true friends inside—your mindfulness, your alertness, your ardency. So recognize divisive speech inside for what it is. And you do that, of course, by … 
  4. Timeless Practice
     … And if you become known for being a quiet person, that’s perfectly fine. We’re in a monastery. That’s okay. You don’t have to be entertaining. You don’t have to be witty. You don’t have to show off your intelligence or show off anything at all. This is how you develop mindfulness. Remember the Buddha’s image for mindfulness … 
  5. For the Cessation of Dukkha
     … As the Buddha says, any craving that leads to becoming is going to be a cause for suffering. So you want to notice what little becomings are appearing in the mind. For the time being, we’re working on one big becoming inside, which is the sense of inhabiting the body from within. Anything else, you’ve got to call into question. All those … 
  6. A Private Matter
     … In that way the meditation becomes timeless. Ajaan Fuang once made the comment that our lives are often chopped up into little times: time to eat, time to talk, time to go here, go there, do this, do that. Instead of having more time when life has more times like this, everything gets chopped up into little tiny pieces and becomes less. But when … 
  7. Best Friends
     … So you give it better food and you train the voices in your mind to be voices of genuine friends, so that this internal dialogue becomes something that’s really beneficial. Once it’s beneficial and delivered you to stillness, then you can let it go. Often we come to the meditation wanting to snuff ourselves out. The self that we’re trying to … 
  8. A Home for the Mind
     … This way, you learn what works and what doesn’t work, and your meditation becomes a skill, not just a crapshoot. The more you pay attention to what’s going on, the more you pay attention to this principle of cause and effect, then the more you begin to discern suffering and its cause. The chant we had just now, about discerning suffering, sounds … 
  9. Inner Baggage
     … If you’ve got huge burdens on your shoulders, and someone else wants to ask you, “Can you put any package on top of your burdens?” uour immediate reaction is, “Can’t you see I’m already burdened down? How can you put anything more on me?” Even the tiniest of little packages they want you to carry becomes too much. And it seems … 
  10. Stay with the Knowing
     … It is a form of becoming, but it’s a useful form of becoming. It allows you to see a lot of things that other forms of becoming don’t. In particular, it pulls you back a little bit from your knee-jerk reactions and especially from the knee-jerk reactions where you’re totally confident that you know what to do—and you … 
  11. The Bureaucracy of the Defilements
     … That way, all the little back corridors and basements in this bureaucracy you’ve got here become opened to your conscious awareness. All of the kamma that you’ve been creating in a semiconscious way becomes a lot more conscious—and your ability to bring consciousness and discernment to these things is what’s going to make all the difference.
  12. Rebirth & Not-Self
     … If the possibility comes up that you could latch on to something where you wouldn’t be annihilated—that would be craving for becoming—you go for it. Or if the pain of life is so bad, you might decide that you’d just rather be done with it, not become anything at all, get snuffed out—that’s craving for non-becoming. That … 
  13. Fear of Missing Out
     … Where is the suffering right now? Can you detect the clinging? What are you clinging to? Why are you clinging? What’s the craving? Is it a sensual craving? Is it a craving for becoming, a craving for non-becoming? Are you developing the path to know these things better so that you can abandon the craving and comprehend the clinging? Which parts of … 
  14. Every Little Bit
     … Tip it a little more and the drops get so frequent—dropdropdrop—that they become a continuous stream of water. So don’t look down on those little efforts to give rise to skillful qualities. Even if it seems that unskillful qualities of the mind are overwhelming, over time those small skillful qualities begin to gather. In the Buddha’s image, it’s like … 
  15. Evaluation
     … That way, the breath becomes comfortable, the mind can begin to settle down with a sense of ease and well-being, and the mind and the breath can become snug together. That’s the point where you don’t have to evaluate things anymore. Then you can just settle in. As Ajaan Lee pointed out, the evaluation there is the beginning of discernment. You … 
  16. Close to the Heart
     … That way, the simple fact that you’ve got a breath becomes more than just a means for keeping the body alive. It can actually be used to heal the body, to deal with different types of pain in the body. At the same time, it gets more and more healing for the mind. As you become more sensitive to precisely how you approach … 
  17. The Quality of Your Awareness
     … In other words, figure out how you might conceive of the breath, how you might picture the breath to yourself, to allow it to become more quiet and to allow the mind to become quieter too. As things grow more quiet, then you begin to see that, at least in the body, you begin to pick up on patterns of tension you missed earlier … 
  18. Questioning Your Way to Certainty
     … This, as the Buddha said, is how the Dhamma becomes visible here and now. Someone once asked him, “What does it mean, ‘visible here and now’?” He responded, “Do you know in your mind when passion has not been abandoned?” “Yes.” “Okay, there it is: the Dhamma that’s visible here and now. And do you know when passion is abandoned?” Well, you would … 
  19. Clinging-Aggregates in Context
     … You use clinging-aggregates as part of the path so as to get to know them, because the state of becoming you crave with concentration is a transparent kind of becoming that allows you to see these processes in action—unlike other forms of becoming. For example, when you’re involved in sensuality, the focus is out there on the object. You tend to … 
  20. Remembering Ajaan Fuang
     … As Ajaan Fuang always said, “Mistakes can always be rectified if you’re willing to look, willing to admit that they’re mistakes, and look inside yourself for what went wrong.” So you become responsible. You become accountable. That’s how an independent streak becomes not just willfulness and stubbornness, but an asset in doing your duty of trying to comprehend suffering, abandon its … 
  21. Empathetic Joy
     … And when you can settle down with a sense of well-being like that, it becomes a much more solid base for the insight that’s going to grow as your concentration grows stronger and you become more skilled at it. So, if you’ve been neglecting empathetic joy in your practice, maybe it’s a good time to give it a little more … 
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