Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- How to Be Alone… In this way, as you meditate, you become your own best friend, instead of your own worst enemy. You learn how to handle being alone. And it’s only when you can handle being alone that you can really handle being with other people. You don’t get swept away by their ideas or their moods, and you can actually become a source of …
- A Better Place to Feed… But he also discovered that if you do it with knowledge, it can become part of the path to the end of suffering. The fabrications he points to are: One, the breath—bodily fabrication. Two, verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself, which he calls directed thought and evaluation: when you choose a topic and then you make comments on it, ask questions …
- The Four Jhanas… You gain a sense more and more that the breath and the awareness become one—because, after all, they’re filling the same place. The awareness fills the body; the breath fills the body; each fills the other, and they become one. The stronger the sense of oneness, the further and further away the hindrances go. They may nibble at the edges of your …
- Balancing Tranquility & Insight… On the other hand, you also become sensitive to how the state of the body affects the way you breathe. Then the Buddha has you get sensitive to the entire body, after which he tells you to calm bodily fabrication, that’s the fourth step in the tetrad. What this means is to calm the effect of the breath on the body. The breath …
- Secluded from Sensuality… As you’re getting the mind into concentration, it’s based on a desire for becoming: You’re trying to give rise to a state in the mind and trying to annihilate any other mental states that come up. So craving for becoming and craving for non-becoming do play a role—as you’re trying to master the skills of concentration. The same …
- Pride in Your Craft… That way the issue becomes more of a challenge and less of a dreaded judgment. So as we meditate, we focus first on what we can do in the present moment to make things better. This is why the breath-meditation method of Ajaan Lee taught focuses on breathing in a comfortable way. At the same time, you learn from what you’re doing …
- Breaking Old Habits… To become an arahant means you become someone worthy, someone worthy of respect. The first stage on the way is called stream-entry. You enter the stream to nirvana, the stream to true peace. The meaning of the image is that once you reach that point, it’s inevitable, just like getting into a river. The current will carry you down to the ocean …
- Look Around… Everything becomes very narrow: This has got to be that way; that’s got to be this way. We get addicted to certain ways of thinking, and they become a spiral, around and around and around. If you can’t get out, you’ve got yourself trapped. It’s like that story of the deer in the forest in the winter. They have their …
- Asalha Puja – Completeness… sensual craving, craving to become this or that, or once you become this or that, craving to get rid of that, craving to demolish it. This is how most people’s minds work. But the Buddha said there’s another kind of desire, another way of understanding desire, which is actually part of the path. It comes under right effort: the desire to abandon …
- Fear of Death… Ultimately it becomes an actual experience based on your actual efforts. It’s not just news about what somebody else did in the past. It’s your news. Of course, nobody else has to know. As the chant says, it’s paccattam, something that each person can experience only for him or herself. But when it becomes a reality in your mind, it makes …
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