Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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