Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Get Real
     … As you allow yourself to become more and more sensitive to what you’re feeling, the tension in the body can begin to relax. You’re not here trying to prove anything or to force anything. You’re here to explore: What have you got right here right now? If there’s a sensation of tension or tightness in any part of the body … 
  3. Gaining the Dhamma Eye
     … So our practice should be aimed at becoming certain in this way, gaining the Dhamma eye, seeing the deathless. The purpose of the four noble truths is to focus us in that direction, to get us there. But more is required than just knowing the four noble truths. The Buddha said there are four qualities that help get you to that first taste of … 
  4. Healing Awareness
     … So it’s a good topic for becoming sensitive to what your awareness is like, what your focus is like. As you get more sensitive to the breath, you become more sensitive to the mind in a way that heals both sides.
  5. Food Insecurity
     … These are the things we feed on, and from this feeding we create our states of becoming: the worlds of experience in which we move, where we’re going to find our food, and our sense of what has to be done within those worlds, what opportunities they open, what opportunities they close. As the Buddha pointed out, once you get to this stage … 
  6. Heedfulness
     … You have to learn from all of these things so that you can become more and more skillful. And that looking requires a lot of heedfulness. Because we do have this tendency to trust in our intentions. “We mean well,” we think. “What looks good to us must be good.” And yet we have that problem with delusion. We have to keep watch over … 
  7. Voices in the Mind
     … They’re still in there and they’ve managed to become part of your identity or part of the many identities inside you. It’s the same old stuff over and over and over again. See that these are just old movies and you know how they’re going to turn out. You’ve seen them many, many times. And where do they go … 
  8. A Full Range of Archery Skills
     … That way, things become clearer and clearer in the mind. There’s a passage where the Buddha compares the skills you learn through doing concentration to the skills of an archer. You can shoot long distances, fire shots in rapid succession, and pierce great masses. Those are three very different skills. Firing shots in rapid succession means that you’re alert to see things … 
  9. Don’t Underestimate Merit
     … That’s the point when it doesn’t become worth doing anymore. Your sense of self is a kind of doing. You’ve had many senses of selves and many ways of doing them. As you practice, you get more and more demanding about what you want to identify with and finally you get to a point where an identity becomes an activity that … 
  10. Settling In
     … That’s what’s called becoming. Once you have places, then you settle into those places: That’s birth. Often those places are not really here at all. They’re off in some imaginary world. But what we have right here is a type of becoming as well, this state of being in which we’re a human being right now, inhabiting this body … 
  11. A Connoisseur of the Breath
     … So mindfulness becomes right or wrong depending on the task to which you apply it. There is such a thing as wrong mindfulness, keeping the wrong things in mind. So as we’re practicing, we want to make sure our mindfulness is right mindfulness. There are two spots in the Canon where the Buddha defines it. The best known definition is in terms of … 
  12. Staying Normal
     … When we decided we wanted to become human beings, we weren’t thinking about this. We were thinking about how much we would enjoy human life. But this is part of the contract. So when it’s a normal part of life, we have to learn to keep our minds at normalcy when these things happen. And to do that, we need to be … 
  13. The Reality Principle
     … When you develop these limitless qualities of mind, and the mind becomes very expansive. And it’s the nature of such a mind that the results of past bad actions don’t have such an impact. They don’t impinge on the mind as much. So this is one very good reason to develop these qualities of mind: When the results of past bad … 
  14. Here to Learn
    We’re all sitting in the same room, but each of us is in a different world—what the Buddha calls becoming. The room here is our becoming on a human plane. We all have a share in that, but our perspective on that plane is something very individual. We’ve each taken on a role as a being in this realm, and we … 
  15. Discipline Is a Choice
     … This is why the Buddha has you understand the process of becoming. When a desire comes up, then around it develops a sense of you wanting the desired object and you being able to attain that object. Then there’s the world in which might you do that. You slip into that world and you go with it. Ajaan Suwat calls becomings “the traveling … 
  16. How to Leave Meditation
     … As the practice becomes more continuous and not chopped into little pieces, it can develop momentum. As Ajaan Fuang said, you have to learn how to make your meditation timeless. That means staying with it regardless of what time of day it is. Our problem is that we have too many times: a time to eat, time to work, time to rest, time to … 
  17. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … At first it’s just a lark, but then they become earnest. As a result, their luminosity disappears and they fall to a lower realm. That’s the way it is with a lot of us. Something starts out as, “Just do this for a lark.” Then it takes over, and the state of your mind falls. So you have to be careful about … 
  18. Joy in Getting It Right
     … You want to understand the different steps in the processes of how it creates a thought and how it creates a state of becoming. These things are a lot easier to watch when the mind is creating good states of becoming, acting on good thoughts, because it would be disheartening to see all the nefarious intentions you usually give in to, if that’s … 
  19. Nostalgia for Suffering
     … A mind thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to be a lizard… wouldn’t it be cool to be a frog… wouldn’t it be cool to fly up and down and back and forth, you’d become a hummingbird.” And the mind is more variegated than all those animals out there, so there’s no way that the Buddha’s going to detail … 
  20. Pleasure & Pain
     … The third level is where the insight really becomes your own — it’s your own sensitivity showing you these things. Once you’ve developed your beachhead, your quiet corner, work out from there. See how it relates to other things going on in the body — particularly other feelings of pleasure, other feelings of pain. Some kinds of pain you can work through. As you … 
  21. The Ivory Intersection
     … You’ve probably seen people who were strong willed, physically strong, mentally strong, who reach a point when they get so old, and their strength is no longer there, that they become like withered flowers that fade away. That’s a shock. What happened to the strength? It seemed so strong at the time. For many, many years, these people seemed strong, yet it … 
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