Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Isolating the Aggregates
     … You have to realize that there are lots of little centers in the body, little sensation centers, and all you have to do is give them a little bit of space, and then a feeling of what seems like neutrality to begin with will actually become pleasurable—if you give it space, if you’re not pushing and pulling it around too much. Then … 
  3. Sucked into the Tube
     … This is how discernment develops, and this is how discernment becomes the kind of discernment that can liberate you. If you want to see fear or anger happening, you want to see it while it’s actually happening. You don’t want to go through instant replays, because your video machine has its defects. It’s not nearly as effective when you see it … 
  4. A Special Time
     … What’s the right amount of pressure? And what’s the right way of conceiving what you’re doing, conceiving the breath? As you evaluate these things to see what works and what doesn’t work, this is how meditation becomes a skill. In the Canon, the Buddha uses a lot of analogies to describe meditation with processes drawn from skills. For instance, it … 
  5. Centered
     … And instead of being nourishing and refreshing, the concentration will become tiresome. But if you can think of all the scattered tentacles of your awareness coming back into the center and leaving everything on the periphery very relaxed, it creates a kind of stability that’s easy to maintain. It may not be easy to get used to this in the beginning, especially if … 
  6. You Can Do It
     … That was one of the questions apparently that Mara asked him: “Who are you to become Buddha? Who do you think you are?” Tradition has it that the Buddha touched the ground, and the Mother Earth Goddess came up and squeezed out her hair. All the water of all the goodness he had done over those many eons came out and washed away all … 
  7. Right & Right
     … How do you become mature? You don’t bring maturity with you, but you keep looking at what you’re doing and keep being mature enough to admit when you’ve made a mistake. That’s how this larger quality of maturity is going to develop. So you don’t throw away what you’ve learned, but you realize that it has to be … 
  8. On Deserving to Be Happy
     … You have to become more intelligent in how you learn. The Buddha outlines four of what he calls the bases for success. They’re four ways of practicing concentration that emphasize different aspects of concentration or what can get the mind into concentration. But if you line them up as a list, they work pretty well as a guide to what you have to … 
  9. Dhamma in Line with the Dhamma
     … Yet you try to get it to realize that there are rewards from becoming trained. You feed it well; you play music to soothe it. Gradually, it becomes more and more willing to be trained. In the same way, even though it’s difficult in the beginning to get the mind to stay here, you try to reward it with interesting breaths and pleasant … 
  10. Conviction in Charge
     … He said that this conviction is a strength, and that we should develop that strength to the point where it becomes what he called a faculty—(indriya) in Pali, which is related to the word Indra, the name of the king of the devas. When a strength becomes a faculty, it basically takes charge of the mind. It becomes the major determining factor in … 
  11. Fabricating the Present
     … People often talk about how, when they’re practicing a skill, if they get really good at it, there come times when they get into what they call the zone, where everything seems automatic and even the slightest things become apparent — where they’re one with the baseball, or one with the bat, or one with the basketball. In the same way, when you … 
  12. All-around Eye
     … You’re not practicing to become famous or to stand out. You’re trying not to be entangled with people. You don’t get involved in a lot of projects that entangle you in the affairs of society and pull you away from the practice. There’s a nice passage in the Canon describing the monk who’s practicing unentanglement: When he has visitors … 
  13. Wisdom Through Training
     … This is how you become your own refuge, how you become reliable: You learn how to watch what you’re doing, watch the results, and then figure out ways of doing it better. That’s how the mind can train itself. Sometimes you hear that the human mind is so defiled that it can’t possibly lift itself out of its defilements. Actually, though … 
  14. Dhamma Medicine for Free
     … You learn the basic principles and then you apply them to what’s happening right here, right now, so that the skill becomes your skill, not just something you’re imposing on the body and the mind, but something that feels good from within. That way, sitting here just breathing, if you do it with enough knowledge and enough skill, becomes a really pleasant … 
  15. A Haven for Inner Wealth
     … That well-being, again, becomes food for the mind. It encourages you to stick with good intentions all the more. Finally, there’s discernment, when you see what is actually skillful and what is not, and you pursue that into more and more subtle levels. These are the qualities we want to protect because they protect our good actions. That’s why they’re … 
  16. Your Game Leg
     … Well, learn how to question those agreements—these little pacts the mind has with itself—so that your looking and listening at the very least don’t damage the state of the mind and can actually can become part of the practice. Moderation in eating is the third principle. How much do you need? When you fill up your bowl or your plate, are … 
  17. On Top of Your Actions
     … Even if things don’t become a turmoil here, your body is a turmoil waiting to happen. Aging is going to happen, illness is going to happen, death is going to happen, all because of this body. You have to ask yourself, “Are you ready for it?” If not, what needs to be done? What work do you need to do on your mind … 
  18. Surveying the World
     … This is a point in his life that the commentaries get all upset about, because after all, he was going to become the Buddha anyhow, right? He was going to teach, but after his awakening he began to realize how difficult it was going to be. You look at the remainder of his life and you can see that it was full of difficulties … 
  19. Shaping the Present
     … So here you try to reclaim your breath, become sensitive to how the breath is feeling, and then try to calm it down. Realize that you do have a role in this. You have some choices you can make. Try to choose to breathe in a way that’s going to calm the mind down, soothe the mind, bring it into concentration. As for … 
  20. A Quiet Spot
     … Of course, there will be other dangers, but the most difficult part in the beginning is just getting the mind to settle down, to become established with a proper sense of balance - not too little energy, not too much energy, just right. And until you get that sense of ‘just right’ there’s going to be a lot of trial and error. Sometimes it … 
  21. Deep Time
     … They have to fall down from heaven and become human beings for a while. They’ll be in love as human beings as they were when they were devas, but they’ll have to be separated three times. Then, after the third separation, they can come back to heaven. The body of the poem—and it’s a long narrative poem—is a very … 
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