Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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