Search results for: "Becoming"
- Page 20
- A Path Under the Trees… the craving for sensuality, the craving for becoming, the craving for non-becoming? The first factor of the path that he found was right concentration. There’s another way he tells the story in which he actually got started with right resolve, but the two are very closely related. Right resolve is to resolve not to focus on sensuality, but to resolve on renunciation …
- The Pleasure of the Middle Way… If you really pay attention here, if you’re consistent in your awareness of the breath, smooth in your awareness of the breath, then the breath becomes smooth as well. It becomes more and more comfortable. And what starts out as just an ordinary feeling of being okay becomes more intensely pleasant. You can let that feeling spread throughout the body. Think of it …
- The Buddha’s Relationship Advice… This was apparently back in the early days before King Pasenadi had become a follower of the Buddha. But one of his queens Mallika had already become a follower. So he said to her, “This Buddha of yours has said that those who are dear bring suffering.” And she said, “Well, if that’s what he says, then it must be true.” He said …
- Progress & Regress… That element of regret, the Buddha said, was what’s going to be the germ for his becoming a private buddha someday. Even the ultimate bad guy, Mara, is supposed to become a buddha sometime in the future. All the ultimate bad guys in the Buddha’s stories: There’s ultimately a good end for them. You haven’t done anything nearly as bad …
- Guarding Against Trouble… All these are qualities you want to develop so that you have a basis for dealing with the greed and aversion and the sensuality, the desire for becoming, all these things that would otherwise come flowing out of the mind. When you meditate, you’re creating a good state of becoming: a state of becoming that has a pleasure that doesn’t need to …
- Giving Ballast to the Mind… What would feel good right now to the mind? Which part of the body would you like to satisfy with a comfortable breath? Go through the body section by section, and become sensitive to what that particular part of the body needs in terms of breath energy coming in and going out. How do you bring it in so that it feels good and …
- A Thread Out of the Maze… Once you start using it in a skillful way, you start becoming more and more willing to look at the power of your intentions, to admit the mistakes you made in the past, and resolve that you don’t want to make them again in the future. This ability to stay with your breath in the present moment to develop a sense of ease …
- Alone & with Others… That way, living alone doesn’t become a problem or an obstacle to your practice; and living with other people doesn’t become an obstacle, because you’ve learned to develop a sense of balance. Particularly when living alone, there’s a need to have an outside observer inside the mind. This connects with a teaching that the Buddha gave his son Rahula, when …
- Inner Refuge… It becomes easier and easier to stay here consistently. Ultimately, you find yourself breathing with a sense of fullness in the body. You’re not forcing things too much. The breath comes in, goes out, it tends to get more shallow and quicker as the breath energy needs in the body are met. You even get to the point where it seems to stop …
- Secluded from Sensuality… This is what becoming is all about. You have a desire, then you have the world around that desire, and in order to pursue that desire sometimes you have to make it a very narrow world, where your role in that world is very narrow as well, and you have to squeeze the mind to fit into it. So why do you go for …
- Undefeatism… There’s that question the Buddha has you ask yourself: “What have I become as days and nights fly past, fly past?” What you become has to do with your actions. And here you are, living a life that has the opportunity to practice, has the opportunity to make something out of yourself. And what are you doing with that opportunity? I knew a …
- Refuge… As these qualities become more and more developed within us, then our refuge becomes ultimately something we don’t have to recollect because it’s right there always. But until that point, keep the Buddha in mind. Keep his last teaching in mind to be heedful, along with all the dangers that teaching warns you about, and all the promise that it entails.
- No Happiness Other than Peace… You become a thief, you become a highway robber, you become an adulterer or adulteress, you become cows, sheep, goats, what not. There are constant opportunities to objectify yourself in really awful ways. There’s constant conflict. The Buddha’s insight is that if you learn how to stop objectifying yourself, then you don’t turn other people into objects. You can live with …
- Only Your Best… It gets into the practice of meditation, which becomes one more thing you do while you’re multitasking. You read about people meditating while they’re jogging or they’re on their exercise machine. Everything becomes something that’s multitasked with something else. When that happens to meditation, though, you’re missing one of the important qualities—citta, which means giving your whole mind …
- To Certify Yourself… But as distractions get weaker and weaker, you don’t need to keep fighting things off, and that tension becomes a disturbance. In other words, there’s a disturbance in the concentration itself. If you notice that, you can let it go, and yet the mind can still stay in place. After a while, the process of the mind’s talking to itself about …
- Actor & Experiencer… Instead, you take your sense of I and me, and you learn how to apply them skillfully so that the actor becomes a skillful actor, the experiencer becomes a connoisseur, a discerning experiencer. This way, your sense of self, instead of being an obstacle in the path, actually becomes a means for developing it. As the Canon says, there’s going to be a …
- Learning from Labor… You become more sensitive as you go through the day to the different ways in which you create a mental state or a physical state. You get to become a better judge of which kind of states are worth creating, which ones are not. In developing your powers of judgment, that’s what the reflection is for—to gain a sense of where the …
- A Multilingual Mind… And people who become bilingual begin to notice that they have a separate personality in the other language, a separate sense of how the world works in the other language. The process of becoming skilled in the other language is very good lesson in learning how to take things apart in a new way, seeing processes as they happen. Then you turn around and …
- Concentration & Renunciation… It’s in developing this taste for pleasure, becoming more sophisticated in your palate you might say, that you develop wisdom, you develop discernment. And you become a better and better judge of which kinds of pleasures really are in accordance with the Dhamma and which ones are not. Which kinds of pains are in accordance with the Dhamma and which ones are not …
- Tough Goodwill for a Tough World… You realize that if you allow yourself to have ill will for anyone, you’re going to do some very unskillful things around those people, and that’s going to become your kamma. So it’s primarily as a protection for you. This is a theme you see throughout the Canon—that goodwill protects you from your own actions. At the same time, the …
- Load next page...
