Search results for: "Becoming"
- Page 28
- 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 …
- The Goldsmith… So just as becoming a goldsmith is a skill that takes some time and strong powers of observation, becoming a good meditator requires the same qualities. We’re not just here to watch or to be aware. We’re here to be aware of what we’re doing that’s causing suffering and how we can stop it. That requires putting the gold into …
- Friends Inside… That way, you and the breath become better and better friends, so that as soon as you want that sense of ease, all you have to do is just think about the breath, and there it is. It opens things up, gives you energy when you want energy, helps you relax when you want to relax. And you can pose little questions. What’s …
- Decisions… The more you watch the movements of the mind and the breath, the more familiar they become. As they become more familiar you start seeing subtleties you missed before. This is why the goal also requires time. If total skillfulness were something you could create in one moment, it’d be great. But that’s not the way skills mature. You keep working at …
- Interdependence & Death… In other words, you don’t want to get involved in becoming, because that’s what becoming is: an identity in a particular world. You’ve seen them all in principle. They all start and they end, and no matter how wonderful they may be, there’s nothing left when they’re gone. We like to think that we have good memories of the …
- The Buddha’s Letter… It’s in developing the path that you become self-reliant. As the Buddha said, if you can’t rely on yourself, who are you going to depend on? Remember that conversation that Venerable Ratthapala had with King Koravya about why he left home to become a monk. And one of the reasons was because the world has no shelter. “No,” the king said …
- Forging a Path… And to think about that one place, and to examine it, evaluate it, so that it becomes a better place to stay. If you force the mind to stay with an uncomfortable breath, it’s going to rebel. So give it a sense of ease in the breathing. Allow the breathing to become refreshing. This gives the mind something good to do, and you …
- Concentration Teamwork… What you want to do is get away from the sense of the breath coming in and going out, and focus more and more on the sense of breath energy already in the body, the energy that’s there all the time whether you’re breathing in or breathing out, because that’s going to become more and more the center of your focus …
- The Awful Truth… sensual desires, states of becoming, views, ignorance. These things keep fermenting in the mind, bubbling up. The most obscure of them, when we look at the terms, is the becoming. These are these little worlds that the mind creates for itself. You see this process really clearly if you notice how you fall asleep. As you begin to loose your bearings in the world …
- The Missing Truth… As you develop them, then this really becomes a good place to stay right here. Your mind is more and more inclined to want to be here. It’s happy to be here. So try to bring all of these things together. When they’re brought together, that’s when they grow. It’s like a seed. If the seed is in a little …
- The Steadiness of Your Gaze… When you focus on the breath, you want to become one with the breath. When you focus on the body, let your awareness become one with the body — not an awareness ready to jump someplace else, but an awareness that seeps into the body, saturating everything down to your fingers and toes. The steadiness of your gaze is what’s going to help things …
- Everybody Suffers… this drive for becoming. I was talking this evening to someone about the Buddha’s take on happiness: Normal happiness is based on feeding. This person was saying that the solution would be to have lots of different food sources, so that if one food source is denied, you have lots of others to fall back on. But that’s really blind. There comes …
- Load next page...
