Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Perfections as Priorities… One is that you try to become really excellent and foremost in these particular qualities of the mind; and, two, you want to give them top priority, make them foremost in your life. When you’re working on a job, whether or not the job succeeds, you want to be sure to develop qualities like patience, truthfulness, determination, and discernment regardless. Sometimes the success …
- The Spider on the Web… Why should you try to banish them? But actually, you want to see the process by which thoughts are constructed, how a thought world, how a state of becoming is put together, so that you can understand why the compelling ones have so much power. You want to get really quick at that to see what the different stages are, until you can catch …
- Respect for What’s Noble… But, he’s saying, we learn to put an end to that clinging, first by searching for the cause, which is three kinds of craving—for sensuality, becoming, or non-becoming—and then putting an end to the cause. So the truths he teaches go against the grain, because they locate suffering and its cause in things we like, things we feed on. To …
- When You Practice on Your Own… What does it mean to “wander off” to other things? What happens? You begin to see the process of becoming as a thought-world appears and you decide whether to go into it or not. If you go into it, that becomes a state of becoming and birth. You learn how not to fall for those things. You begin to learn the stages, the …
- Beyond Imagination… The body becomes more and more of a burden the longer you have it. The current Supreme Patriarch of Thailand likes to make this point again and again. People ask him how he is, and he says, “Look, I’m a ninety-year-old man. How do you expect? The proper question is, ‘Can you bear with it?’” There are people who find that …
- Slogging Through Difficulties… That’s how a moment of patience becomes part of the perfection of patience, a moment of equanimity becomes part of the perfection of equanimity. That’s how the narrative—whether it’s fast or slow, pleasant or painful—gets good. That’s the part that you can write in the present moment.
- Goodwill for Safety… It becomes more and more of a habit. That way, you can live with people who are threatening and not end up doing something unskillful to protect yourself. You can provide yourself with skillful protection. There was a woman who came to see Ajaan Fuang one time, and I’d known her for years. She’d hang around Wat Asokaram, and she’d visited …
- Detail Work… They’re about the size of rice grains, but they become enormous. Although maybe that’s not a good analogy, because it takes a long time for the trees to grow that large. The defilements, in their seed form, are more like little sparks that start a fire. The fire can spread very fast, and you don’t want to wait until it’s …
- Balancing the Bases for Concentration… So we start out with the breath, learning how to look at the breath, learning how to ask questions about the breath, so that the process of breathing becomes more than a simple physical processes keeping you alive. It becomes something that’s really refreshing. What kind of breathing would feel refreshing right now? What kind of breathing would feel blissful? Pose the question …
- Surprise Yourself… The question is, how much of the automatic side of it really is automatic? How much of it is directed by intentions that have become subconscious? One way to learn about that is to try to adjust the breath. Find a way of breathing that feels good. The Buddha himself suggests this in one of his analogies: You’re a cook working for a …
- Looking after Yourself with Ease… If you learn how to do them with knowledge, they become part of your path. They become your refuge. If something difficult comes up, you breathe in a different way, you think in a different way, you apply different labels and perceptions. Train yourself beforehand to have a good stock of these things on hand. This is why we listen to Dhamma talks, why …
- Happy About Kamma… And of course, that becomes their kamma now. The fact that you had that past bad kamma: There are unskillful ways and skillful ways that you can think about it. The unskillful way would be to think, “Well, this person was simply carrying out the dictates of kamma. So the person’s not responsible or is actually doing something good.” That’s unskillful. There …
- A Mirror for the Mind… In this case, the perception of the breath and the different ways of perceiving the breath allow it to become more comfortable. The sense of well-being, the sense of refreshment sooth both the body and the mind. So you’ve got all the factors that the Buddha said shape the mind right here. You’ve got the breath, which influences the way you …
- Right Speech, Inside & Out… Otherwise, we become enemies of one another’s practice. So keep the Buddha’s three tests in mind each time you open your mouth. Ajaan Fuang’s test was always: Is this necessary? If it’s not, you don’t have to bother. We’re afraid that if we’re quiet, people will think bad things about us. But that’s not always the …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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