Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- Nobody’s Servant… Allow the breath to become comfortable, think of the sensitive parts in your body and how the breath might nourish them. Sometimes just thinking of that as a possibility changes the way you breathe, changes the way you relate to the breath. Align the sensitive spots with the breath; keep them together, and they give energy to each other. Then the mind can calm …
- The Duties of Happiness… Either sensual craving, the idea that you’re fascinated with thinking about sensual pleasures; or what’s called craving for becoming, in which you want to take on a particular identity in a particular world of experience; or craving for non-becoming, in which you don’t like the identity you’ve got and you want to destroy it. These are the things that …
- The Flood of Views… the flood of sensuality, becoming, views, and ignorance. And yet that raft, the noble eightfold path, made out of the twigs and branches on this side of the river, also includes right view. So there are certain views you use to get over the flood of views. And it’s important that you learn how to distinguish the two. We live in a society …
- The Purity of Your Intentions… Your goodness then becomes independent. There may be times when, by holding the precepts, you’re going to suffer a loss of some kind, but as the Buddha said, that kind of loss is nothing compared to the loss of your virtue. So when information is hard to come by, all you have is your intentions, the purity of your intentions, to fall back …
- A Clear Sense of Priorities… As this sort of mindfulness becomes a more constant feature of your life, it’ll have an impact on the way you meditate when you’re sitting on the cushion here with your eyes closed. And again, the way you meditate while you’re sitting here will have an impact on the way you lead your life. The more they help each other along …
- With Reference to the World… You can type a Q or an S, and it comes out just a Q or a S, but if you press the function key, all of a sudden the Q becomes quit, the S becomes save. The same key does entirely different things. It’s the same with the sensations in the body. There is little stirring in the breath, and the mind …
- The Four Bases of Success… This is why when you’re meditating you want to become friends with the breath. Don’t regard your meditation object as your opponent. Remember all that the breath has done for you. It’s kept you alive all these years. It’s what keeps the body and the mind together. And even right here in the present moment, the breath can give a …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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