Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Practicing Meditation to Perform at Death
     … You can imagine becoming the child of your niece or nephew. Or maybe nobody in the family is going to have any kids, and you become their dog. You’re very protective, but still you’re a dog. So you’ve got to cut off all thoughts of your family. They have their karma, you have your karma, and you don’t want to … 
  3. Right View as Tool
     … sensual craving, craving for becoming, and craving for non-becoming. We love to think about and plan for sensual pleasures. We like to take on an identity of one kind or another in the world, although sometimes we’ve got an identity we don’t like, we want to get rid of it. All these cravings create suffering, and they’re things to be … 
  4. Duties
     … If the end of suffering had to depend on the world outside being perfect, well, it’s very far from perfect and it’s certainly not going to become perfect in our lifetimes. That would mean that the end of suffering would be beyond us. But the fact that suffering is dependent on conditions of the mind and we can learn how to gain … 
  5. The Pleasure Principle Made Noble
     … You actually become more discerning in how you’re going to look for pleasure. So much of what we do in our lives is driven by the desire for pleasure, and yet we very rarely sit down and think it through: what really is pleasant for us, what really does give satisfaction. You have to learn how to see the desire for pleasure as … 
  6. The Buddha’s Metaphysics
     … This is where these principles become relevant to what you’re doing right now. On the one hand, you can choose to be generous, and the immediate result of generosity is a sense of well-being, a sense of your own wealth, of being in a position where you have enough to share. But the influences also ripple out into the future. As the … 
  7. Mindfulness Island
     … This is where mindfulness becomes helpful—because there are values you want to keep in mind, especially as you leave the monastery and go out on your own. You have to rely on yourself to train yourself, to hold the values of the Dhamma in mind, because the world is not going to hold them for you. You can use the internet to listen … 
  8. Being Right
     … You have to be generous with people no matter how wrong they might be—because otherwise, their behavior starts becoming your behavior. They’re stingy, and you become stingy, too. Then you find yourself clashing and you fall into despair. You wonder if there’s ever any way that you can come to any kind of peace. On the one hand, though, you have … 
  9. Capture Your Imagination
     … See what becomes interesting. See where it becomes a good place to stay. It’s not the case that, when you meditate, you don’t use your imagination at all. Actually, you have to use it very actively. You’re creating a world in the mind—but not solely in the mind. It’s also in the body. As you may have noticed, when … 
  10. Analyzing Suffering
     … It, too, becomes a means to an end. The pleasure of the practice becomes a means to an end that’s outside of the aggregates. Once you’ve reached there, then you can totally let go. It’s a more natural process, a more skillful process than just trying to drop everything and claim to be like the person who lets go of the … 
  11. Always in Training
     … The new student came, wanted to become a sword master, too. So the sword master put the new student to work: carrying water, chopping wood, doing chores around the center, never once mentioning the word “sword” or “master” or “fighting.” The student was beginning to wonder if he was ever going to get to become a master or even to pick up a sword … 
  12. Cause & Effect
     … This is the right thing to do, it makes perfect sense to do it—so why not do it? The Buddha says to abandon sensual craving, to abandon craving for becoming and craving for non-becoming or for annihilation. When you directly see that these are really unskillful desires and you have an alternative and you’ve got the strength to follow that alternative … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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.
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