Search results for: "Becoming"
- Page 37
- 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.
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Load next page...
