Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- Push Yourself… You can feed yourself, become wealthy, maintain your health by stealing. But you’re not going to steal because you realize that holding on to the precepts is more important that holding on to those other things. So, the Buddha never promised that things would be easy. But by learning how to stress out over being good, you get the right attitude to bring …
- Thoughts About Thinking… If you try to hold on to the idea that there is no self, what does that do? It becomes a position that you have to argue over, that you have to defend against all takers. And that’s certainly not going to put an end to suffering. It becomes an object of clinging for you, too. But sabbe dhamma anatta teaches you: “Let …
- Mindstorms… When the Buddha says that becoming is conditioned by clinging, the word “clinging” can also mean feeding or the act of taking sustenance. And the sustenance is the passion of desire — the desire that makes us create these worlds, that pulls us into these worlds, and impels us to take them as far as they can go. There’s always an act of feeding …
- Building on Certainty… And over time it becomes a skill. You establish a beachhead here that’s more and more solid as you become more and more sensitive to what’s going on, what you’re doing, what the results are. And in this way your knowledge expands. At the same time, it becomes more and more refined. Over time, you get more and more alerted to …
- Inner Refuge Through Inner Strength… And this is what the meditation is for, to teach you how to depend on yourself—how to become your own refuge. We talk about how we take refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha—both on the internal and external levels. On the external level, you’re inspired by the story of the Buddha; inspired by his teachings; inspired by the …
- Fires of the Mind… Even though it’s still burning, at least it becomes more useful. You can read by the light of an oil lamp. It’s much more difficult to read by the light of a fire. Because the fire is always flickering, it’s not good for your eyes. But the oil lamp is steady. And in that steady light, you can see a lot …
- Step Back & Watch… But that’s a state of becoming. It’s a skillful state of becoming, it’s necessary as part of the practice, but you don’t want to fall for the assumptions that go along with that state of becoming. You want to be able to step back from those as well. So develop the stillness of the observer that holds that question in …
- How We Cling… They’re the basic parameters of becoming: the act of taking on an identity in a world of experience. A lot of philosophy, a lot of our everyday thought, deals with the reality of these issues: “Who am I? What is the world? How do I fit into the world? How can I get what I want out of the world?” When we have …
- The Skillful Heart… The little things that are happening in the mind, the subtle movements of the mind, become very clear. This is the other lesson of discernment, which is that the suffering that’s weighing down the mind is not being imposed on you from outside. It comes from within. Craving, clinging—these are the things that you’re doing. You’re actually doing the suffering …
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