Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 35
  2. The Not-Self Discourse
     … This is what it’s been in the past, made out of these same aggregates, and this is what it will be in the future, as long as you stay wandering, samsara-ing, moving from state of becoming to state of becoming. It’s going to be made out of the same aggregates. Past, present, future, near and far, refined, gross, anywhere you can … 
  3. An Island of Concentration
     … As you develop that whole-body awareness, it becomes a whole-mind awareness as well, and you become more sensitive to the voices in the mind that would pull you away, more sensitive to the nibbling thoughts around the edges of your concentration. So right here is where you want to be: alert, mindful, and ardent in doing this well. That’s how you … 
  4. Training in Commitment & Reflection
     … This is how the process becomes nourishing to the mind. The Buddha says there are two activities that nourish the Dhamma—in other words, they nourish the Dhamma within you. One is commitment and the other is reflection. You commit yourself to doing this and then you reflect on how well it’s going, what you’ve learned. As we meditate we’re training … 
  5. No Mistakes Are Fatal
     … He killed his father and later felt a lot of regret, but there’s a tradition that he’s going to become a Private Buddha someday, even though he’s got some really bad karma to pay off first. Even Mara, who’s the figure of temptation in the early Buddhist texts: There’s a tradition that he, too, will someday become a Private … 
  6. Cornered
     … As they say, necessity becomes the mother of invention. What are you going to do? Well, you’ve got Ajaan Lee’s guidance about working with the breath. And you’ve got the Buddha’s recommendations for working with the breath, along with his recommendations for ways to talk to yourself, questions to ask about what you’re doing right now, what you could … 
  7. Moral Intelligence
     … When you develop this virtue and morality of the mind, it becomes more and more your normal state. In fact, that’s how Thai ajaans like to translate virtue: Virtue is normalcy. It’s your normal state. You can have good virtue and you can have bad virtue – your normalcy can be bad as well. What we’re trying to do is develop a … 
  8. The Skill of Not Suffering
     … Another one of the reasons why we work with the breath energy throughout the whole body is because once the breath becomes comfortable, there’s a tendency to drift off if your range of awareness is narrow. But if your range awareness is broad, covering the whole body from the top of the head to the tips of the toes—that’s the range … 
  9. Bringing Daily Life into the Practice
     … At the same time, your speech becomes a good influence on your meditation. What the Buddha calls verbal fabrication is something you’re engaging in all the time: directed thought and evaluation. Every time you speak, you first have to choose a topic and then make a mental comment on it. You’ll be bringing those two activities, or those two skills, into your … 
  10. Refuge
     … The more solid you are in this, the truer and more observant you are in your practice, then the more you can become a refuge for other people too. We do take refuge in the noble Sangha, and if we become members of the noble Sangha, we can be a refuge for others. So this is a practice that’s good all around.
  11. In Line with the Dhamma
     … This is how we can cross across the flood of sensuality, views, becoming, ignorance. This is how you do it. This is how you make that raft. This is how you swim. This is what you do when you get to the other shore. But you say, “No, I’d rather just hold on to these twigs and branches and leaves on this shore … 
  12. Be Decisive
     … That’s how concentration arises and that’s how concentration is maintained— and how it becomes something you can rely on. If you’re the kind of person who sticks your toe in the water and says, “Oh! It’s a little bit cold,” and you jump back and stick a little bit there, “Oh, I don’t know about this,” back-and-forth … 
  13. The Guarantee of Concentration
     … As you learn how to wait, the place where you’re waiting has to become your home. This is the trick to being patient. If you’re constantly in a state of tension and unrest, patience is difficult because you’re having to maintain a mental position that’s not very stable and requires a lot of energy. But when you get this sense … 
  14. Many I’s, Many Eyes
     … Allow things to feel full as you’re breathing in, and even to maintain that sense of fullness as you breathe out, so that the breath energy and the mind become more solidly together, more steady. You’ll notice here that you’re actually watching two things. One, you’re watching the breath, and two, you’re watching the mind. This is an important … 
  15. How to Think about Death
     … This becomes your foundation, your safe place. So we think about death, we think about the unattractiveness of the body, not to get discouraged, not to be depressed. In fact, for the opposite reason: We think about these things as an encouragement to practice, to realize: What in life really is worthwhile? The body is useful, but we can depend on it only up … 
  16. Two Eyes, Not Just One
     … Yet we may hide those other problems from ourselves, which, of course, then becomes still another problem. This is one of the reasons why we’re trained to be patient and not jump to conclusions. As Ajaan Lee said, if some insight comes up in your practice, ask yourself to what extent the opposite is true so that you don’t look at things … 
  17. Vows
     … Otherwise your practice loses focus, and the “practice of daily life” becomes a fancy word for plain old daily life. You need to keep reminding yourself about why you’re meditating, about what the meditation really means in the long-term arc of your future. You want true happiness, dependable happiness, the sort of happiness that will stay with you through thick and thin … 
  18. Choices Now & at Death
     … craving for sensuality, for becoming, and for non-becoming. That’s in the second noble truth. Yet in the fourth noble truth, he points out that the desire to develop what’s skillful and abandon what’s unskillful is part of the path to the end of suffering. So not all desire is bad. You want to get to know your desires really well … 
  19. Lessons from the Buddha’s Awakening
     … You become a deva, you become a Brahma, you think that you’re the creator of the universe, even—and then you fall from that, and you become an ordinary being of one kind or another. You can think about all the work that’s done to get up to those high levels. And think about how people, when they get to a high … 
  20. Feeding Off of Others
     … They become a part of us. Then it’s all ripped away. The Buddha talks about the fact that you can’t easily meet someone who hasn’t been your mother or your father or your brother or your sister or your daughter or your son in the long, long time you’ve been wandering on. He’s not saying this to get you … 
  21. Mindful of the Buddha’s Shoulds
     … We crave sensuality—the act of fantasizing about sensual pleasures—or we crave what the Buddha calls becoming, which is taking on an identity in a world of experience. It can be either a world in the mind, or the world outside. Then there’s craving for non-becoming: You find yourself in a world or in an identity that you really don’t … 
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