Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. When Ill Will Is in Fashion
     … That’s when it does become a brahmavihāra. This is something you have to develop. Some people say that goodwill is natural to us. All we have to do is forget about our poor social conditioning, get beyond that, and our natural goodwill will arise. Well, we do have goodwill naturally, but we also have ill will naturally. If ill will were not natural … 
  3. Putting out the Flame
     … As long as there’s that narrative of you as a person, remember that being is related to becoming: You’ve got an identity in a world of experience, and if you have to leave this world you’re going to go looking for another world—as long as there’s the narrative of you. You and your friends, you and your relatives, you … 
  4. Training Your Selves
     … Your sense of not-self is also an action—because after all, how does self happen? It’s part of becoming. You have a desire, and then around that desire there develops a sense of the world in which the object you’re desiring can be found, and then you as a being within that world. You take on many roles. You’re the … 
  5. Priorities in Life
     … Otherwise, it becomes like those little plants that you see growing out of the sidewalk in New York. They’re squeezed into the narrow confines of the cracks on the sidewalk. They come out looking all twisted. You want the practice to have priority. After all, the way we live life normally in this society, society’s main interest is that you become a … 
  6. A Strong Sense of Self
     … Your attention becomes more constant. There’s a sense of ease and well-being. And it’ll take a while to get a sense that you’re able to control this, to maintain this balance, but with time and with persistence, you find that this becomes more and more your natural home. There’s a sense of the breath not only in the body … 
  7. Make the Most of Right Now
     … What am I becoming right now?” Are you becoming a better person, someone who’s less reliant on the pleasures of the senses, and more reliant on the pleasures of the path? Or is it the other way around? You’re the one who has to judge. As the Buddha said, the Dhamma is found through a combination of commitment and reflection. You commit … 
  8. Visakha Puja – Shaking the Earth
     … That becomes our karma. That shapes the world in which we’re going to live. So, with the concentration practice, we can shape the mind so that it’s not so hungry for things outside. And it can gain a sense of detachment. You’re putting yourself in a better position to do what is wise, to do what is skillful, to do what … 
  9. Your Goodness is Your Protection
     … In other words, you decide that life becomes so hard that you’re going to abandon the Dhamma to survive. But otherwise those inner qualities are there. As the Thais like to say, fire doesn’t burn them, water doesn’t wash them away, the wind doesn’t blow them away. Nobody can steal them, or in the phrase of the Canon, “Kings and … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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.
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