Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. 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.
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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.
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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.
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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.
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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