Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 38
  2. Use Your Defilements
     … Without that, virtue just becomes a ceremony, a ritual. But if you take on the precepts, you’re forced to look at your intentions, because a precept can be broken only if you break it intentionally. So you have to notice: Why do you do things? You want to be honest about that. And you have to develop good qualities in the mind if … 
  3. Anchored by Skillful Roots
     … But apparently our insecurity is going to become much more obvious. It’s like a big storm coming through. When you know a storm is coming through, you’ve got to do what you can to hunker down, to withstand it, so that you don’t get blown away and the things around you don’t come crashing down on top of you. In … 
  4. Balanced Breathing
     … It can become your basic default mode. So be careful. That’s one of the ways you can translate the Buddha’s last words. He said to become consummate through being heedful. “Consummate” here means consummate in your virtue, consummate in your views, bringing all the factors of the path to a state of consummation, completion. You do that by being careful, realizing that … 
  5. Technique & Attitude
     … As a result, they didn’t have that sense of confidence, the sense of joy that comes when you follow the teachings and get results, so that you become confident: “Yes, these teachings really do give results and Yes, I am becoming a better person, a happier person because of following them.” These things give you a kind of momentum that you can then … 
  6. A Good-natured Attitude
     … Without your having to think about making it longer, making it shorter – simply being steady with it – it becomes almost automatic: The breath begins to adjust. And that way, you move to the next stage, where you don’t have to think about evaluating the breath or bringing your mind to the breath, because it’s right there, and you’re there with it … 
  7. Doubt vs. Discernment
     … And it really becomes an obstacle. That’s why it’s a hindrance. So when you have instructions as to what to do, do it. Let your questions come from the doing, rather than from the abstraction, just wondering about this teaching, wondering about that teaching. The Buddha lays things out really clearly in the noble eightfold path. You’re going to need virtue … 
  8. Happiness – Yours & Others’
     … One of the meanings of “Tathagata”—one who has become true or become authentic—is that he acts in line with his words, and he speaks in line with his actions. So in your desire to pursue the true happiness of others, you’ve got to pursue your own true happiness first, because it’s only when words are backed up by actions that … 
  9. Truths That Are Noble
     … As we practice, we’re becoming more noble to the extent to which we’re following in line with the noble truths. If we keep slipping back to our old ways, claiming that we’re suffering because this person is misbehaving or that person is not quite right, we fall below the noble level. We’re back to where everybody else is in the … 
  10. We All Start with an Impure Heart
     … The more you can act on it, the more it becomes a tendency of the mind. In his terms, it “bends” the mind in the right direction. The intentions that you act on are the ones that bend the mind. So even though it may be a struggle, when the skillful desire has the last word, that’s what’s going to bend the … 
  11. Generating Power
     … You try to keep the mind at one with its object, make it become one with its object. All of this takes effort, and sometimes people will sit in meditation, put a lot of effort into it, and at the end of the period say, “Well, the meditation didn’t get any results. It was just constant effort.” However, it’s a normal principle … 
  12. Possessiveness
     … Why? Are people not worth sharing things with? And what happens if you don’t let go? There are many, many stories in the Buddhist tradition of people who couldn’t let go of something, and then they come back and become spirits hovering around those places, trying to hold on. That’s a miserable state to be in. That’s why the Buddha … 
  13. Friends with the Breath, Friends with the Buddha
     … The breath becomes even a better friend if you make friends with it. You do it in the same way that you make friends with someone: You have to listen, you have to ask questions, notice. People don’t tell you all about themselves all at once, and often the things they don’t tell you are most important for establishing a friendship. So … 
  14. A Room of Your Own
     … It’s when the mind is still and at ease that it can start becoming more honest. This is why you can pour everything into your diary—be really open with yourself about your feelings, about your thoughts—not just for the sake of self-expression but because you really want to see what’s going on and to straighten it out so that … 
  15. Samvega & Pasada
     … through relationships, through sensual pleasures, through the desire to gain this, to get that, become this, become that. You realize that you can get a lot of the sense of well-being you were searching for in those other ways simply by sitting here breathing. Then you can turn and look at your other forms of pleasure: pleasure based on greed, pleasure based on … 
  16. Stepping Out of Truth Games
     … This is the process the Buddha calls becoming, where, based on a particular desire, you take on a particular identity around that desire. And there’s a relevant world around that desire as well. They all go together. And the fact that we have so many different world, so many different desires can work against us. Like right now, the desire for thinking about … 
  17. Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates
    Our sense of self is a strategy for finding happiness in worlds of becoming. It answers two questions: Who’s going to be able to put forth the effort to bring that happiness about? And who’s going to benefit from it? And depending on how we define ourselves in terms of either of those questions, we decide what’s worth doing and how … 
  18. The Beginnings of Wisdom
     … That search for a way out becomes wise when we look for someone who’s practiced—as the Buddha says, a contemplative or a brahman, by which he means a noble disciple or at the very least somebody who knows the Dhamma—and we ask that person, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” This is the … 
  19. Merit & Skill
    Years back, when I returned to Thailand to ordain, Ajaan Fuang told me that I would have to become skillful in everything in my life as a monk. He said, “It’s not just a matter of getting good at sitting with your eyes closed. There are lots of other skills you have to master, too.” And it was true. In addition to meditating … 
  20. May You Forever Be Well
     … If you lose right view, ill-will becomes something that’s okay, careless actions become okay, and that leads in a downward spiral. So these two qualities, virtue and right view: Regard them as treasures, treasures that you want to hold onto always. Because they can lead to other good qualities in the mind. And they protect you. They’re part of that grounding … 
  21. Adolescent Practice
     … Just let it come in and go out at its own rate.” You may get the basic idea that the less you interfere in the present moment, the better; the more passive you become, the better. But that makes it difficult to integrate meditation with your life. Are you going to go through life totally passive in every situation? That doesn’t work. It … 
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