Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Beyond Nature… Even when you create good states of concentration, that’s still a type of becoming. It still depends on causes and conditions. At least it puts the mind in a position where it can observe the process of becoming and dig deeper, to watch the conditioning, to see how it happens — and ultimately to dig down to an area where there’s no conditioning …
- Befriending the Breath… So you don’t want the breathing to become mechanical. If it starts becoming mechanical and automatic, pretty soon the whole thing goes on automatic pilot, and your attention is wandering off someplace else. So you want to remind yourself that you’re learning something important here. Even before you start learning about the mind, you’re going to learn a lot of things …
- Desire for Happiness… Without that understanding, the desire for happiness becomes sentimental and sometimes rather unrealistic. But as the principle of karma says, if you act with skillful intentions, the results will be happy, the results will be pleasant. This means we have to act with skillful intentions, intentions that don’t want to cause harm. It’s that desire not to cause harm and the realization …
- An Ennobling Pleasure… How the mind creates a sense of becoming this or being that, taking on a sense of identity, assembling a sense of the world, what we mean by the word becoming: The practice of concentration really sensitizes you to how it’s done. Being aware in the present moment is a constructed phenomenon. A moment of awareness is not the deathless. There’s a …
- Many Desires, Many Selves… As you may have noticed, every desire leads to becoming, which is a sense of self in a world of experience. It’s focused on a desired object, something you want—say, an ice cream cone. Then there’s a world in which that ice cream cone exists. All the aspects of the world outside that are relevant to the ice cream cone—either …
- The Brightness of Life… If you get yourself into an unskillful state of becoming, they tell you how to get out by giving you some clues as to how becomings are formed: They’re formed through fabrication. You can look at fabrication in terms of the five aggregates. You can look at it in terms of the three kinds of fabrication that are listed in dependent co-arising …
- Tending the Flame… After a while, the sense of rapture becomes tedious. At first, it’s energizing, but after a while it becomes too much. You want the mind to be even more still. So you tune in to a more refined level of energy. The mind settles down. You finally get to the point where the breath stops. Then Ajaan Fuang would have you bring things …
- Calm & Insight into Pain… In the Buddha’s breath instructions, he talks about becoming sensitive to how the breath affects your sense of the body, how it—in his terms—“fabricates” your sense of the body. And as you watch the breath, you begin to become more sensitive to the feelings in the body and feelings in the mind. And the perceptions: in particular, the perception that lets …
- Refuge & Strength… If you have ill will for them, that becomes a motivating force for your rebirth, which becomes revenge, which is not a good force to have determining your rebirth. So for the well-being of your mind, you need to have goodwill all around. The image the Buddha gives is of a conch player. In those days, trumpets were made out of conch shells …
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