Search results for: "Becoming"
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- What Makes Concentration Right… That’s when your concentration becomes just right. And in that way, the mind really does become single. Sometimes that term, “singleness of mind,” ekaggata, is translated as “one-pointedness,” but the “agga” in there doesn’t mean “point,” it means “gathering place.” The mind is gathered around the breath. All your thoughts, all your feelings, perceptions—everything is right here. We try to …
- A Magic Set of Tools… When you reach the fourth jhana, the Buddha says, that’s where mindfulness becomes pure. The word jhana is related to a verb jhayati, which is a homonym for a verb to burn — to burn in a steady way, like the flame of this candle at the front of the room. Pali has different verbs for the word to burn. There’s the burning …
- Fire Prevention… Then right mindfulness becomes the theme for right concentration. It’s in the fourth jhāna that mindfulness becomes purified. So these factors all help one another along. Now, because mindfulness tends to focus so much on the present moment, we tend to forget that right effort also includes preventing things that are not there yet. This covers two things: prevention and then snuffing out …
- Mindful of Karma… It’s become a buzzword and it’s everywhere. And you know what happens when words become buzzwords: They become buzz. They can mean anything to anybody. But the Buddha used these words very precisely. If you understand what he was getting at when he said to be ardent, alert, and mindful, then you have a clear sense of what to do. So this …
- Working with Fabrication… That then becomes proof that you’ve got to do something right away to deal with the tension in the body, to deal with the sense of dis-ease. You can short-circuit that by breathing in a way that’s really relaxed, pulling yourself out for a bit and saying, “Okay, I can breathe in a way that’s really comfortable.” That weakens …
- Good Heart, Good Mind… When we’re dealing with people who are really difficult, it’s so easy to take their misbehavior as an excuse for our own, but then that becomes our own bad karma and we’ve thrown our highest aspirations away. So develop the qualities both of a good heart and a good mind, a strong heart and a strong mind. Goodwill’s not simply …
- Stay… A sitting position that it would normally take without any problem suddenly becomes unbearable. It squiggles and it squirms. Well, the mind is like that, too. You tell it to stay with the breath and it’s going to squiggle and squirm around the breath. And because it’s so tense around the breath, it can’t maintain this position for long. This is …
- Mental Stirrings… So just as you have to train yourself to become jaded toward advertisements, you have to become jaded toward the way the mind dresses up its thoughts, dresses up its distractions as things that look really interesting, really intriguing, entertaining, or important. If you look at them simply for what they are, you see that they’re just stirrings in the mind that the …
- Expanding Your Awareness… One of the reasons they practice to become arahants is so that the fruit of the merit that comes from supporting them will be great. So one way that you can show goodwill to all beings and really help them to be happy is to sit here and practice, to work on your mind. Another way of expanding your awareness is to keep expanding …
- Life in the Context of the Practice… After all, each of them is a form of becoming, and every form of becoming involves suffering. If you want to be defined by your culture, that means you want to be defined by your suffering. And you can ask yourself, do you really want that? How about creating a larger context? That larger context is made up of the values of the Dhamma …
- Marshalling the Emotions… In other words, use your ingenuity, so that you become more and more interested in staying in the present moment. All too often we approach concentration practice as an exercise in forcing the mind to stay still: not to think, not to move, not to do anything. And of course as soon as you tell it not to move, it’s going to start …
- Shifting Your Paradigm… That’s what allows you to change the people you’re hanging around with inside, so that your perceptions, instead of being harmful to yourself and the people around you, actually become helpful. They become part of the path.
- Ignorance & Deception… The stronger and more solid the mind becomes, the more it can see its motions. Ordinarily, the mind has a funny way of clouding itself out. Or as Ajaan Lee says, it passes out, goes unconscious for a moment, and wakes up and finds itself someplace else. That’s how it moves from one thought world into another one. That right there contains a …
- Greed & Distress with Reference to the World… That’s how mindfulness becomes right mindfulness and your concentration becomes right concentration. As you bring the qualities of mindfulness, ardency, and alertness to what you’re doing, you can create a sense of well-being in which you can look at the world and say, “I don’t need to lay claim to things out there. I’ve got something really good here …
- The Uses of Fear… This feeling can become unskillful when it gets mixed up with greed, aversion, and delusion. But a clear-sighted sense of fear combined with confidence that there is a way out can actually get you on the path. This combination of fear and confidence is what translates into what the Buddha said is the root of all skillful behavior: heedfulness. You realize that there …
- The Reflective Self… In the passage where he says that the Dhamma requires both commitment and reflection, this reflective self provides the reflection and becomes the basis for discernment. When you use it as you meditate, it plays the role of evaluation: “How is the breath right now? Is it good enough? Is it good enough for the mind to settle down with? How’s the mind …
- The Current News… That way, when death becomes something happening right now, or a very strong pain becomes something happening right now, you won’t be in unfamiliar territory. You’ll know the area because you’ve watched it, and you’ve dug down to see what’s really going on right here. That means you’ll be in a position of strength, the strength that comes …
- Appreciating Goodness… The mind becomes a lighter mind, more spacious mind, a mind you can trust a lot more. The scariest thing in life—even scarier than aging, illness, and death—is the realization you can’t trust your own mind. You know something is good, you know something is right, and yet you can’t do it. Or you know something is wrong but you …
- The Train Trestle… What you’re doing here is creating what’s called a state of becoming. Becoming is a sense of a particular world of experience and your identity in that world. Right now, you’re the meditator and the relevant world is the world of your body right here, together with your awareness of the body. This world is based on a desire: the desire …
- Your Committee of Addicts… You can’t imagine yourself playing Beethoven in the beginning, but you work on it bit by bit by bit, step by step, step by step, and you find that you become a different person, a different piano player. You find you can play Beethoven. So, with some members of the committee, you have to take them by the hand and convince them that …
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