Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 21
  2. Nourishing & Interesting
     … When you can ask this question and stick with it, then the meditation becomes interesting. Even the task of staying with the breath—trying to make the breath easeful, nourishing, gratifying—becomes interesting. The body will throw up different problems for you. You can meditate for fifty years and see all kinds of new things coming up as the body does things it never … 
  3. Right Speech
     … You’ve got to be clear about the point at which it starts to become totally pointless, purposeless, where the grease is mucking up the works. You have to develop a sense of how much you should say to make people feel at ease, and then when to stop. This requires real discernment, which is why there’s no precept with this particular type … 
  4. What Should & Shouldn’t Be Done
     … And then in areas that are not covered by the teaching, the Buddha gives us some basic principles on how to decide what should and shouldn’t be done so that we become more and more independent in the teaching. What he’s doing is pointing out possibilities that we may not have known about otherwise. On the one hand, the possibility of training … 
  5. A Pleasure Not to Be Feared
     … That’s how right concentration becomes a step to greater insight. You can become more and more a connoisseur of pleasure. Your sensitivity for what’s stressful and what’s inconstant gets more and more refined. Without this refinement, your understanding of what the Buddha taught about things being inconstant, stressful, and not self is very crude. The practice of concentration helps to develop … 
  6. In Your Right Mind at Death
     … Their beauty becomes a curse—so you have to think about that. Again, this is why we contemplate the body. Get used to taking off the skin in your mind and taking the different organs out and placing them on the ground, so that when the time comes to die, that will be a very quick reaction to any beautiful body that appears to … 
  7. Preparing for Death
     … You’re just there with that sense of perceiving the breath, aware of the breath, and the mind and its object seem to become one. But the paradox here is that as they become one, eventually they will separate out again, but this time they separate out not in line with your preconceived notions, but simply by their very nature. They’re there together … 
  8. Stick with It
     … The dangers, of course, are the possibility of what the Buddha calls “further becoming”: coming back and going through this process of becoming over and over and over again. It’s something we’ve done who knows how many times. There are times when we’ve done it well, and then not so well. Then we do it well again. You’d think that … 
  9. Location, Location
     … That’s how becoming comes from craving. That sense of location is important to understand, because sometimes it goes here, sometimes it goes there, all very quickly. It’s very hard to track down. As the Buddha points out, often we’re not really clear about where our cravings are. These are the things that run our lives, yet often we don’t even … 
  10. Mastering Pleasure & Pain
     … This way you become mature about pleasure and mature about pain. You began to see that neither one is a big deal. That’s when you grow up. It’s like becoming a good musician. You learn how to be very sensitive to how you play, but at the same time you have to be conscious of not simply enjoying the music as you … 
  11. A Sucker for Random Memories
     … You want to see things in terms of either the body in and of itself, feelings, mind states, mental qualities, and if you go into a thought, into a memory, you’re going into a state of becoming. That’s wrong mindfulness. If you can stand out of it and watch it simply as a process, then you maintain right mindfulness—and there’s … 
  12. In Control
     … In other words, the breath becomes your path to the end of suffering, the body becomes part of your path to the end of suffering, your thoughts all become devoted to the end of suffering. You can make that choice and you don’t want anybody else to come and unmake it. You don’t want any random emotions or old habits to come … 
  13. Will Meditation Make You Grim & Dull?
     … It becomes a humor that’s actually more useful and enjoyable, because it comes from a sense of recognizing your weaknesses as weaknesses. The fact that you can laugh at them means that you can step back from them—which means that there’s a part of you that can pull out of that weakness. So one of your best protections against dangers inside … 
  14. A Snare of Death Laid Out
     … It becomes the seed around which the process of becoming gathers, like little bits of dust in the atmosphere that become seeds for clouds, seeds for rain. And it’s good to know where the location is, because all too often we think we want something but once we get it, we realize that it wasn’t what we really wanted. We have to … 
  15. The Mind Comes First
     … Otherwise, the pain suddenly becomes a prior reality, and you find the mind just bouncing off it. When it bounces off, it tends to get in a bad mood. That gets things all worked up, because when the mind gets in a bad mood it becomes a forerunner for bad things in your experience right now. So here’s a chance to test the … 
  16. Breathing Easy
     … Then as that one thing becomes more and more comfortable, more and more refreshing, you think of it spreading out to fill the rest of your awareness, first your physical awareness, then into the mind, so that the sense of body and mind become one. That’s how you develop the singleness of mind that’s a feature of right concentration. You can’t … 
  17. Part II : Common Problems
     … Your thoughts become burdens. You become a victim. If the pain moves around, you learn how to move around, too, in the sense that you don’t sit on one perception all the time. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about asking yourself, “Okay, where is the most intense spot of the pain right now?” As you chase it around for a while, you begin to … 
  18. Guardian Meditations
     … When you can develop dispassion for both, then the mind can become more free. When the Buddha talks about dispassion, he often pairs it with the fact that the mind becomes unfettered, the mind escapes from its prisons that it builds for itself. So try to have those associations around the idea of dispassion: freedom, release. Hold those perceptions in mind. Then finally, recollection … 
  19. Ekaggata
     … So a basic part of the training in terms of generosity, virtue, meditation, is becoming more sensitive to your own actions. It’s interesting to note that when the Buddha starts out talking about the principle of action, he does it in the context of two particular types of action: gratitude and generosity. After all, what does gratitude mean, if not realizing that the … 
  20. Directing Yourself Rightly
     … They become a habit, so that when you try to sit down and meditate, “Well, this doesn’t matter/that doesn’t matter” becomes, “This distraction doesn’t matter. I’ll follow it for a while—it won’t do any harm—and see what happens.” It just eats away at your concentration and sometimes eats it all up. So try to develop a … 
  21. When Things Regress
     … Now, this doesn’t mean that you’ll just stay right there all the time, simply that this becomes the foundation you need for the work that has to be done. The Buddha’s not saying, “Be passive, just accept whatever comes, and don’t try to do anything about it.” You will have to do something about it, but to do something skillful … 
  22. Load next page...