Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. Fabricating Goodwill
     … That’ll give you practice so that you can breathe calmly when the situation actually arises, and then that calm breath will become a key to the doors of your memory so that you can remember, “Oh yes, I did think about this already, and this is what I thought might work.” Then you try it out. If it doesn’t work, you go … 
  16. The Good We Already Have
     … But after a while, you get so that you can stay on, keep your balance for longer and longer and longer periods of time until it becomes instinctual. You get a more and more instinctive sense of how to maintain that balance. So this is what the practice is: practice in sharpening our tools for tuning the mind in and letting it stay there … 
  17. Right Questions in the Right Order
     … for sensuality, for becoming, for non-becoming. There’s a place where the Buddha equates clinging with passion and desire. There’s another place where he equates craving with passion and desire. So, what’s the difference? The difference is indicated by the Pali names for these truths. Craving, taṇhā, can also mean thirst. Clinging, upādāna, can also mean feeding. So you’re thirsting … 
  18. Helping Yourself by Helping Others
     … As you put energy into the polishing the mirror, your reflection in the mirror becomes brighter. The Buddha talks about four qualities that are important to bring to your relationships with other people that are helpful to you. They’re endurance, harmlessness, goodwill, and a mind of kindness or sympathy. When you develop these qualities in your treatment of other people, those qualities will … 
  19. Doing Favors & Making Merit
    I knew an elderly Thai couple who came to the Dhamma late in life and became so dedicated to the practice that Ajaan Suwat had the husband become the lay chairman of the monastery up in suburban LA. They were new to the whole idea of monastery life, monastery etiquette. One Sunday, as people were leaving after having come to make merit, the wife … 
  20. The Carpenter’s Adze
     … You focus on the particulars of the skill, and the larger picture will begin to become clear. You can see this in his instructions on breath meditation. There was that one time when he was telling the monks to be mindful of the breath, and one monk spoke up and said, “Oh, I already do that.” The Buddha said, “Well, what kind of breath … 
  21. The River Gauge
     … Even though it may feel artificial to begin with, as you do it more and more often, it becomes more and more habitual. It’s like the people who come to the monastery. Often when they come the very first time, they say, “My gosh, that road is impossible. There are no guardrails. How can anybody drive down there without fearing for their lives … 
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