Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. Peace on Earth
     … The more you try to force them, the less peaceful things become. But you can set an example inside, an example with your own thoughts, your own words, your own deeds. At the very least, the world of your becoming will have a peaceful center. That’s your main responsibility. As Ajaan Suwat used to say, each of us has only one person. What … 
  10. Comfortable With the Truth
     … As a result, huge areas inside the mind become unknown territory, big blank spaces. And it’s precisely those areas though that we need to know about if we’re going to gain any headway in putting an end to suffering. So overcoming ignorance is not a question of learning about emptiness or Buddha nature or anything abstract like that. It’s just looking … 
  11. Beyond Duality
     … Then you find that once the mind begins to settle down, some of the things you have to do in order to get it to settle down become unnecessary. They actually become a burden to the meditation, a burden to the concentration. As Ajaan Fuang once said, there’s one skill in getting the mind to settle down, and then another skill in getting … 
  12. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … So they wanted to study Thai culture and Thai traditions to see what there was in the Thai tradition that might make them susceptible to become communist, and how that might be changed. One thing they focused on was the teaching on contentment. They advised the political leaders of the country: “You should not teach people to be content.” After all, they wanted Thailand … 
  13. No Running Away
     … In this way, the mind becomes less and less of a mystery to you. And you can become more and more confident in your motivation—not only as you sit here with your eyes closed but also when you’re dealing with other people. It’s normal that we want all our issues to be cleared up as quickly as possible. We would all … 
  14. Learning by Doing
     … And even though you’re creating a state of becoming out of these things, you’re doing it consciously. You’re doing it with a sense of what they are. This is how you begin to parse these things out, because when we try to step into the mind and start observing it without first getting it concentrated, things get very blurry. But as … 
  15. The Right Touch
     … As you use your powers of observation, you become more sensitive. He commented one time on how the commentaries say that breath meditation is the meditation method that’s good for everybody. He said, “That’s not the case; it’s good for people who are precise in their powers of observation.” If your powers of observation are crude, all you see is just … 
  16. On the Path of the Breath
     … Once you’ve learned these ways of dealing with the breath, the workings of your mind become a lot more transparent, just as the breath element in the body becomes more transparent. That’s when you’re ready to take the work of insight even deeper, seeing the inconstancy of anything that’s intended, whether it’s physical or mental — anything that’s fabricated … 
  17. Arising & Passing Away
     … At what point does the body become attractive? At what point does it become an object of pride, an object of lust? It’s those other things that arise and pass away: Those are the things that you really want to see. So a lot of the clear seeing is looking at one thing and seeing the things that are connected to it, seeing … 
  18. Barriers in the Heart
     … All the various forms of clinging, everything that we cling to, becomes a barrier, becomes a limitation. As the Buddha said, we define ourselves by what we cling to. And that becomes our limitation, our measure, as he says. It’s in learning how to let go of those very subtle levels of clinging that the limitations are dropped, and then nobody can define … 
  19. Generosity First
     … Over time, as the children start doing it themselves, the process becomes less and less mechanical, and after a while they begin to take pleasure in giving. At first this pleasure may seem counterintuitive. The idea that you gain happiness by giving things away doesn’t come automatically to a young child’s mind. But with practice you find that it’s true. After … 
  20. Right Mindfulness
     … Mindfulness becomes right depending on the task to which you put it, it becomes wrong depending on the task to which you put it. There is such a thing as wrong mindfulness and keeping the wrong things in mind. So as we’re practicing here we want to make sure that our mindfulness is right mindfulness. There are two spots in the Canon where … 
  21. Truths Noble in the Heart
     … That’s when the truths become noble. In other words, they stand out beyond, and over, and above everything else. So you don’t just stick them into the corners of your life. This is another reason why we have the monkhood, the monastic life, and provide the opportunity for people to live in a community where the bottom line is not money. The … 
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