Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 27
  2. Right Here, Right Now
     … The more you get to know what’s right here, right now, the more those other things will become plain. This is not to say that book learning is totally useless. It’s very useful in giving us pointers as to where to look, what questions to ask. But as for the answers: If they really are going to be answers, they have to … 
  3. Friends with the Dhamma Wheel
     … the three kinds of craving for sensuality, for becoming, and for not-becoming. The duty there is to abandon it so that the suffering it’s causing can end. In other words, the Buddha is taking a cause-and-effect approach to things. When we find ourselves suffering and we want to get rid of it, it’s like trying to get the water … 
  4. Balanced Meditation
     … There’s very little opportunity to become well-rounded. There’s very little opportunity to learn how to become good at something that you’re not automatically good at. But with the meditation, the Buddha gives you the tools. This is how you get good at something. You try it. Notice the results. Consult other people. Try it again. Try to notice the connection … 
  5. Paying Off Your Debts
     … So whatever practices get us in the direction of becoming arahants, those are the practices for paying off our debts. Ideally, we have to learn how to produce wealth from inside so that whatever the debts are, we can pay them off. Otherwise, if you just borrow from somebody else, then you’re indebted to that person. It’s like borrowing from one bank … 
  6. Virtues & Values
     … This is how mindfulness becomes your refuge. You not only remember what’s right and what’s wrong, but you also learn to recognize it here in the present moment, and you remember what to do about it. If something unskillful comes up in the mind, you have to recognize it as unskillful. You can’t say to yourself, “Well, this is my thought … 
  7. Look after Your Baby
     … Actually, it’s in the caring for it that the concentration actually grows and becomes stronger. So the mind that says, “I simply want a place to rest and I don’t want to be bothered”: That’s the mind that just wants to go to sleep. However, to say, “I want to rest in concentration so that I can gain the strength to … 
  8. How to Leave Concentration
     … If they rejoice in that, if they approve of what you’ve done, then that becomes their merit. There’s a wide misunderstanding about what it means to transfer merit. You don’t really transfer it, you dedicate it. If the other person knows of what you’ve done, then their approval becomes their merit. So again, you’re trying to bring goodness into … 
  9. Count Yourself Lucky
     … If you’re not consciously changing the breathing, then all the adjustments of the breathing become subconscious where you can’t see them. So take your desire for immediate happiness and focus it right here. We talk about the path having a goal, but it doesn’t save all of its good things for the end. As the Buddha said, the path is good … 
  10. Attached to Concentration
     … Your guitar playing doesn’t become your own until you’ve done that. Just play around, and a lot of times you’ll find sounds that don’t sound very good, but other times, you may run into something very unexpected that you like. The act of exploring in and of itself becomes enthralling. You have to remember that the Buddha is talking about … 
  11. The Raft of Jhana
     … You have to think about these things because you need to get this process of directed thought and evaluation under control if it’s actually going to become a factor of the first jhana. Because right concentration is the other factor that branches right out of right resolve. The Buddha has a definition for transcendent right resolve, and it basically comes down to the … 
  12. Comparing Mind
     … It was a good book for training your eye, whether you’re planning to become a photographer yourself or just wanting to learn how to appreciate photography. It’s good to have your eye trained that way, having something to compare so that you can see, “Yes, this is different from that, this is better than that.” And you begin to understand why. It … 
  13. Events as Events
     … If you add your sense of “you” to it all, then it becomes a state of becoming. For the time being, you don’t want to go there. You want to get used to seeing these things simply as events. When they’re simple events, you begin to see how ephemeral they are, how quick they are to change. You begin to wonder how … 
  14. Construction Techniques
     … It encourages you to become more and more sensitive to how you’re doing these forms of fabrication, and you’re learning how to do them more skillfully. It’s in this way that these fabrications become part of the path, and not just the cause for suffering. The Buddha recommends that you get really good at this. When you get skilled at using … 
  15. When This Is, That Is
     … These become part of right concentration. Your awareness of all this becomes part of the path, too. In other words, you take all the aggregates, which normally you lug around as your sense of self, and you turn them into a path—by the way you use them, by the way you shape them. It’s up to you. That’s the power you … 
  16. Inner Wealth
     … As a result, your actions don’t become wealth at all. They just become more scattershot. Sometimes they weigh you down. We believe in karma not just because it’s a good thing to believe, but we can see it in practice: You change your intentions and that will change the way you act. When you change the way you act, you live in … 
  17. Inconstancy
     … You notice that some of the factors you use to put concentration together start becoming extraneous. In the beginning, you have to talk to yourself, evaluate the breath to make sure that the breath feels good for the body, feels nourishing, that all the different breath energies are working together, and that they’re just right for the mind. The breath is not laborious … 
  18. The Seven Factors for Awakening
     … As the Buddha points out in his discussion of the four bases for success, desire, if it’s too strong or too weak, actually becomes unskillful. If it’s just right, it’s part of the path. The same principle applies to persistence, intentness, and your powers of analysis: If they get too carried away, they actually become unskillful; if they’re too weak … 
  19. Look in the Mirror
     … Think of all those images the Buddha gives of the drawbacks of sensuality, to make you come to your senses, to reflect on the fact that when you feel strong sensual desire, part of the mind actually thinks that it becomes attractive as it gets attracted to other things. But you have to see sensual desire not as a position of strength or as … 
  20. Cultivate a Limitless Heart
     … But it’s important that we keep our work in perspective, so that the heart and mind don’t become narrow. So reflect on that passage in the chant we recited just now: “Cultivate a limitless heart.” A limitless heart is expansive and doesn’t see things just from a narrow perspective. It has to take a wider perspective. In other words, our individual … 
  21. A Skillful Attitude
     … When you regard the meditation as a skill like this, you find that it becomes a lot more reliable. And with your change in attitude, you’re actually more primed to see things in terms of the four noble truths. There’s a tendency to regard concentration practice and discernment practice as two different things, but ideally they should come together. And what are … 
  22. Load next page...