Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Becoming Trustworthy
- Becoming & Birth
- Skills for Dying WellOne of the Buddha’s most important teachings is on the topic of becoming. The Pali word is bhava. It’s a process that happens in the mind. Like everything else, it’s rooted in desire. Then, around that desire, you develop a sense of the world in which the desired object can be found. Then you take on a role in that world …
- Good Craving, Clinging, Becoming
- Lessons of Distraction… See it as your opportunity to see the mind in action as it creates what are called states of becoming. As the Buddha said, the craving that leads to becoming is the cause of suffering. So you want to look for the craving that goes into distraction, because that right there is the craving that causes suffering. The best way to watch it is …
- Do You Want to Escape Becoming?
- Look after the SourceThere’s a process that the Buddha calls becoming. You start with a desire, something you’d like to get. And then around that desire, there’s a world and there’s also a self, the identity you take in that world. As you enter into that identity, that’s called becoming. You enter into the world and the identity at the same time …
- Meditation as a Skill… And it’s in this way that you get more and more clear about what’s going on in the mind as you’re creating this state of becoming. Of all the states of becoming, this is the easiest one to notice, to analyze, so that you can understand what it means to go into a state of becoming. Ajaan Lee has a nice …
- A Sense of Duty… That’s a craving that, ironically, leads to more becoming. You take on an identity as a person who wants non-becoming. That becomes your new becoming. So when you see these things happening in the mind, your duty is to abandon them. The duty with regard to the third noble truth, the cessation of suffering, is to realize it: realizing that when the …
- Antidotes to Craving… craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. Craving for sensuality usually comes from our attachment to our sensual pleasures and our fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures. At the moment of death, of course, you’ll be pulled back to pleasures of the past. There can be a lot of nostalgia. You miss this, you miss that—this person, that situation …
- Looking Off to the Side… You get around the quandary of craving for becoming and craving for not-becoming by looking at things in a way where the basic ideas of becoming and not-becoming—i.e., the idea of there being a self or there being no self or the whole idea of existence or nonexistence—just doesn’t occur to the mind. You’d think that people …
- Concentration that Bears Great Fruit… As soon as the desire is fulfilled or you give up on the desire or something else takes your attention, you move on to another becoming. As the Buddha said, this is the process of rebirth, although he doesn’t use the word “rebirth.” He uses the word “birth,” but basically it’s further becoming or renewed becoming. It’s what happens not only …
- Desires Have Their Reasons… desires for sensuality, desires for becoming; desires for non-becoming. For instance, with becoming: You want to become a certain person in a certain world. And up to an extent, that’s useful. But then you’re going to reach the limitations of becoming. As the Buddha discovered, if you want to destroy the kind of becoming you’ve got, you immediately take on …
- Goodwill for All Beings… Once you become more and more sensitive to the breath, you become more sensitive to the mind. You become more sensitive to the things you say, the ways you think. You begin to see more clearly where you’re causing suffering, where you’re causing stress, because you have a sense of ease against which to measure it. So this technique of learning how …
- Food for Consciousness… craving for sensuality, craving for becoming—i.e., your desire or thirst to take on an identity in a particular world of experience—or craving for non-becoming: You decide you don’t like the identity you have and you want to destroy it to find something else. And, as the Buddha notes, in the craving for non-becoming you take on a new …
- Older than the Cosmos… And then it decides it doesn’t like where it is, so it develops craving for non-becoming. But in the craving for non-becoming, you end up creating more becomings. That was one of the Buddha’s insights: The craving to destroy what you’ve got leads to more becoming. So you want to see how these things get stitched together. The reason …
- Stake Out… That’s the level that the Buddha wants you to operate on, before these things have a chance to become a state of becoming, because as you get a sense of dispassion for them, in seeing that there’s not much there, it aborts any states of becoming that would come from them. As for the states of becoming already there, they’re going …
- Ironclad Technique vs. No Technique… True adults have a range of skills that they’ve mastered, starting with techniques they’ve been taught, and then learning how to vary them so that they become their own skills. They become the judges of what approach is required at any particular time and what counts as good results. If you’re not sensitive to what you’re putting into the present …
- Ignorance… This is a form of becoming, but it’s the kind of becoming you need in order to get to the end of the path. Because as you learn how to understand the process of becoming through creating skillful states of becoming, you develop the sensitivity that allows you ultimately to let go of any kind of becoming. And finally when you see the …
- Working Through the Breath… That’s one of the reasons why we focus here on the breath and work with the breath, so that we can create better states of becoming in the mind. It’s only when we do the becoming skillfully that we can ultimately get to the point where we can go beyond becoming. You can’t bypass this process. You have to go through …
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