Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. The Door of the Cage (2)
     … These are the basic terms of becoming—the act of taking on an identity in a particular world of experience. The Buddha’s asking you to define world and self in ways that are actually for your own benefit. When you’re thinking of giving up or getting discouraged, you’re not thinking about the beings out there who are reading your mind. You … 
  3. Magha Puja
     … The more it becomes habitual to back off, back of, back off, then the more difficult it is to actually see anything for what it is. So when things get tough, don’t get discouraged. When nothing seems to be happening in the meditation, just stick with it. Watch. Because often it’s in the midst of a dry patch like this that something … 
  4. The Anatomy of the Present
     … He asked, “How do you become a being?” It’s based on your desire. “How do you understand the world?” It’s through how you experience things at the senses. And those experiences of the senses are shaped by your desires. The question then is: How do we take on an identity as a being? How do we shape the world? That’s the … 
  5. Question Your Actions
    One of the reasons we suffer is because we crave what the Buddha calls becoming. It’s the act of taking on an identity in a world of experience: in other words, trying to figure out who you are and where you are. One of the other ways we suffer is, once we’ve got an identity of that sort, we don’t like … 
  6. Right View Comes First
     … either craving for sensuality, craving for a state of becoming, or craving to obliterate some state of becoming you already have. Buddha would then explain that this craving can be put to an end through dispassion. And you develop that dispassion by developing the path. So the whole path is there inside right view, which of course is inside the path, in the path … 
  7. Three Parts of Right View
     … craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. But the desire to give rise to skillful things and the desire to abandon unskillful in the mind: Those desires are actually part of the path. Now, the cessation of suffering is the point where there’s nothing further that needs to be developed. You can’t clone it by just sitting around and … 
  8. The Triple Training
     … While you are with the breath, you’re ardent to be as sensitive as possible to the mind and the breath, because the more sensitive you are to the breathing, the more comfortable it becomes. So virtue and concentration help each other this way. The same with concentration and discernment. I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked: “How strong does … 
  9. What Are You Taking into the Future?
     … We’re driven by our thoughts, by the little becomings we create in our mind, the little worlds we create in our mind, and they obscure our awareness of what’s actually going on. There’s an interesting passage where the Buddha says, “Something you’ve never seen before: Do you have any craving there?” And you might think, well, of course, you can … 
  10. Turning Anxiety into Heedfulness
     … That’s why I said this.” When that happens, you become just a cog in a machine and let yourself get pushed around. It’s when you can stand back and say, “No. Even if people mistreat me, I will still behave in an honorable way”: That pulls you out of the machine. It makes you independent. There will be a healthy sense of … 
  11. A Sense of Well-being
     … your energy becomes a more positive influence on other people. The way people react to you will change, the influence you have on other people will become a better influence. And you begin to see that the effort put into maintaining this inner sense of openness and wellbeing while you’re doing other things is not simply adding one more task onto all the … 
  12. Goodwill for Bad People
     … It’s when your precepts become limitless that you have a share in that limitless safety. And for the precepts to be limitless, your goodwill has to be limitless as well. You can’t reserve your goodwill only for people you like or people you feel deserve your goodwill. It has to go to everybody. That doesn’t mean that we pretend not to … 
  13. Rooted in Desire
     … In that way, desire becomes your friend. The same in the path as a whole: We want peace of mind, but if all you do is sit around and think about peace of mind, peace of mind, how much you want peace of mind, and yet it’s not coming, that kind of desire is not helpful. Instead, if you want peace of mind … 
  14. The Right Attitude to the Body
     … Nanda got really embarrassed about the whole thing, so he got more serious about the practice and ended up becoming an arahant. He went back to see the Buddha and said, “About that promise—the heavenly nymphs: I release you from the promise. I don’t need them anymore.” That’s Nanda’s story. Rupananda’s is not in the Canon. There’s one … 
  15. Honest & Observant
     … But as the Buddha discovered, our being is becoming, and becoming is a kind of doing. You want to be sensitive to that all the time. As you meditate, you’re trying to develop three qualities around your actions that lead to knowledge: You’re mindful, ardent, and alert—alert to watch what you’re doing; and mindful to remember what you’ve learned … 
  16. Use Your Imagination
     … It’s part of the anticipation that gives rise to states of becoming in the mind. We anticipate that a particular thought world is going to be fun, so we create it. And if you don’t like your creation, well, you change it here and you change it there a little bit. Then you get in and you ride. If you can do … 
  17. Harmony
     … This doesn’t mean that you become totally passive, it means simply that you learn how to be non-reactive. When the mind doesn’t react, when it’s not quick to be triggered, then you can see more easily what should and what shouldn’t be done. Your sense of shame, your sense of compunction, can have some time to work so that … 
  18. Issues of Control
     … You’re taking things that are not-self and you’re learning to influence them so that they can become part of the path. There will come a point where you realize you can take these things only so far, but it’s far enough to get into a good state of concentration. It’s far enough to become part of the path to … 
  19. The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless
     … Concentration then becomes a basis for more discernment. When the mind is still, it can see itself a lot more clearly, and you begin to see that the suffering the Buddha identified as the clinging-aggregates is there even in the concentration. Remember the other image the Buddha has of the path, which is that it’s like a raft, a raft made out … 
  20. In Harmlessness Is Strength
     … This is how you become harmless. This is how you become strong—because the strength lies in the harmlessness. When the Buddha began to get disillusioned with his austerities, he recalled the time when he’d gotten the mind spontaneously into jhana when he was a young child. The first question he asked himself was, “Why am I afraid of that pleasure? Is there … 
  21. Taking Apart Suffering
     … This way, by taking things apart, you find that you become a lot more manageable. Once you’ve cobbled together a skillful mood in one part of the mind, then you can look at the unskillful mood and see how it’s created out of little bits and pieces: a little thought here, a little physical sensation there, and they get glommed together. That … 
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