Search results for: "Becoming"

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