Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Heedful of Small Dangers
     … You can’t be careless about small fires because small fires can become big. You can’t be careless about little princes, because little princes can grow up and they can bear grudges. In the same way, you can’t be careless about this little spot of stillness in mind, because it’s your only hope. And it can become larger if you work … 
  3. Truths of the Will
     … That’s going to become true only if you decide that this something you really want, that it’s worth working on, and you stick with that decision. When you look at the things that mean the most to us in life, most of them are truths of the will. If you just looked at the world from the point of view of an … 
  4. Insight Is a Judgment Call
     … When you can see generosity in that way, it becomes a lot easier to be generous. It changes your ideas about how important it is to own things as opposed to how important it is to develop qualities of mind. The same with virtue: There are lots of things you could gain by breaking the precepts, but there comes a point when you realize … 
  5. Building Concentration
     … trying to create a state of concentration, noting what works, what doesn’t work, so that you can see how a state of becoming gets formed in the mind. The same applies for distractions. You can simply follow the distractions but, again, you won’t really know them that well. It’s when you fight against them—that’s when you know them. As … 
  6. Respect for the Mind
     … In this way, if you take your desire for happiness seriously, your actions become pure. And you have to become heedful. Simply the fact of taking your happiness seriously, the Buddha said, is a sign of wisdom. Because wisdom begins by asking this question: “What when I do will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” You ask this question to people who … 
  7. The Humane Quality of the Path
     … He says that however you identify yourself, that becomes a limitation on yourself. So his attitude is to look at everything in the mind is an action, and you see that there are all kinds of actions in the mind. As Ajaan Lee once said, it’s when you start practicing that you really see how many defilements you have. You find there’s … 
  8. On Being Non-reactive
     … The more there’s a sense of full energy in the body and stillness in the mind, the calmer the breathing becomes. And as long as you’re fully alert, there’s nothing to fear if the breath stops, because you’re not suppressing it. It’s just that the body’s energy needs are filled. If it has any need to breathe in … 
  9. All About Change
     … This, the Buddha said, is one of the duties of mindfulness when it becomes a governing principle. If something good hasn’t arisen yet in the mind, you try to give rise to it. Once it’s there, you don’t let it go. You hold on to it. You maintain it. So mindfulness watches both for the kind of change you encourage and … 
  10. Get Out of Yourself
     … Now, the workings of kamma can be very complex, but they determine where we go, what we are, and what we become. He realized that the big issue was action, and the general pattern of action was something we all have in common. Then, in the third watch of the night, he expressed the knowledge he gained, not in terms of “I did this … 
  11. Directing the Flow
     … So it becomes a battle of the wills. Part of you wants to go whatever old way you went before, the way an untrained horse would just want to run around the meadow, and part of you realizes it needs to be trained. So there’s always going to be this tension in the practice. And an important part of gaining the upper hand … 
  12. Goodness & Goodwill
     … And yet, before the punishment for having killed those people came to him, the Buddha encountered him and got him to lay down his weapons, to meditate, and to become an arahant. So the king forgave him and decided not to punish him. There were a lot of people out there, though, who were not happy for him. Their relatives might have been among … 
  13. Top Priorities
     … At the same time, when it has first priority in that way, it can develop a momentum because it becomes more and more continuous. The training of the mind becomes 24/7. There’s a continuity, a momentum that builds up, which you can’t have when everything is chopped up and squeezed into this corner here or that crack in your daily life … 
  14. Metta Through Samvega
     … And as you look at your actions and realize that they don’t get into conflict with anybody, your confidence in the path becomes more than just confidence. It becomes something you really know. So on days when you find yourself tied up in thoughts of ill will, think about that image of the fish, realizing that you don’t want to be one … 
  15. Cook Your Mind
     … There comes a point when the path is fully developed, and although it requires passion to develop the path, there comes a point where that, too, has to become something you comprehend and abandon. You have to develop dispassion for it. As Ajaan Mun says, there comes a point where all four noble truths become one. And the duties become one: Let go. But … 
  16. Think Calmly about Death
     … The mind becomes a blank. It can’t remember anything. So you’ve got to practice ahead of time. Learn how to breathe calmly and then work your way up to thoughts of dangers. Years back, when I was in college, my name got drawn to be part of a psych experiment. Fortunately, it was after I’d started meditating, and the experiment was … 
  17. Over the Pass
     … Just take these things on their own terms, before they turn into becomings, so that you can hold them back. Look at the Buddha’s analysis in dependent co-arising: Right after ignorance comes fabrication, and after fabrication comes consciousness, and then name and form. These are just events. Form is your sense of the body as you feel it from within. Name is … 
  18. Kindfulness
    Kindfulness May 1, 2010 As you train the mind, focusing on the breath, allowing the breath to be comfortable, trying to become friends with the breath, it’s a very direct way of showing goodwill to yourself and to the people around you. Goodwill for yourself in the sense that you learn how to develop a source of happiness that comes from within. Your … 
  19. Lessons in Happiness
     … Then you allow the breathing to calm down so that it becomes gentler, there’s less intentional fabrication, and the breath can get more and more quiet, more subtle. As you allow the breath to get more subtle, there’s a greater sense of fullness in the body. One way of inducing this fullness is to remember that when you’re breathing out, don … 
  20. Mindfulness & Effort
     … If all you have are comfortable sensations in the sense of beautiful things to look at or nice things to listen to, but the mind is empty of good intentions, it all becomes very meaningless. You begin to realize: This is just physical stuff. And the physicality of it all, the brute unknowingness of the physical world, begins to get to you. It doesn … 
  21. How to Listen to the Dhamma
     … That way, in the Buddha’s terms, you get sensitive to what the talk is aiming at, you get sensitive to the Dhamma and its meaning, and that’s what gives rise to the joy that later becomes one of the causes for concentration, and the concentration can become a condition of a further insight. This means, of course, that you approach the Dhamma … 
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