Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Inner Worlds… You need a space in the mind where things outside don’t matter, because otherwise the mind becomes a slave to things outside. It becomes their servant. It needs its time alone where the clamoring of the world outside just doesn’t matter. What matters is the survival of your goodness, your ability to live with yourself. And that takes work. So take this …
- Working Hypotheses… And we’ll find that as we follow the practice ourselves, we become more trustworthy, too. Fortunately, the path doesn’t save all of its rewards for the end. There are lots of good things we develop within ourselves as we follow the path. We become more generous, more virtuous, less harmful. We find that our goodwill can extend further than it ever had …
- The Quest for Inner Happiness… That way, the simple act of sitting here and watching the breath becomes something special. It can become a foundation for a happiness that’s genuine, a happiness that’s harmless, a happiness that’s actually a gift to yourself and to other people. For most us, our quest for happiness is not a gift to anybody. It’s a process of taking. But …
- Respect for the Path… And our search for happiness becomes something noble, because we realize that what’s getting in the way of our happiness is our cravings. As the Buddha said, cravings are the cause of our suffering. And to admit that to yourself, and to be willing to overcome some of your cravings, is a noble act. All too often we just want to follow our …
- Getting Your Head Around the Goal … It also becomes sensitive to more refined levels of stress, dis-ease, or disturbance in the mind. It’s when you can see those things that you’re more likely to be able to see things that are deeper still inside. So we focus on following the path. We don’t try to turn the path into the goal. That would be like wanting …
- Ironies… As it happens, the further you get away outside, the less certain things become. Yet those are the things we seem to be most interested in. We miss what’s happening right inside us, right next to the mind. So change your focal point. Bring it right here. There are lots of ins and outs to the breath. You can make it longer, shorter …
- What You Don’t Like About Yourself… It goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth until the whole question of who did what to whom becomes meaningless. And there’s no need to gather up the details and keep them in your mind in hopes that someday you’ll be able to make a report and justice will be done, because the idea of justice requires that there …
- Tranquility & Insight in Tandem… Otherwise, it just becomes extended thinking. You should be looking to see what you’re doing while you do it. You want to be sensitive to see—as you’re staying here with the breath, and there’s a sense of ease, but there’s a wavering in the ease—what caused the wavering? What did the mind do? That’s the kind of …
- Single-minded… The issue is, can you see when you’ve settled in and feel secure and feel solidly here? Is there anything in the concentration itself that is still a disturbance? After all, the directed thought and evaluation are necessary at the beginning, but after a while they do become a disturbance. A sense of rapture and refreshment, the energy of the breath courses through …
- Self View & Conceit… Wherever there’s a desire, there’s going to be becoming. And becoming involves a sense of self. What the path needs is a skillful sense of self. The Buddha talks about this quite a bit: “The self is its own mainstay.” In other words, you have to depend on yourself. If you don’t depend on yourself, who are you going to depend …
- Proving the Teachings… You don’t become a control freak. You become a control sage. When you know how to control the mind skillfully, you can find happiness in any situation. It’s just this issue of how craving and ignorance give rise to the suffering that really weighs us down. So start looking at your experience in those terms. The more you bring the mind to …
- Pleasure on the Path… Then it becomes more a question of how you make sure that this sense of ease gets translated into the rest of your life so that it’s not something you experience only while you’re sitting here. If you don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by it, you can start noticing: This is how you breathe. This is where you focus. This is …
- Planting a Tree… And, of course, that thinking becomes a new kind of defilement. When the results come slowly, you get discouraged. You think, “I don’t have the potential.” Everybody has the potential. It’s simply that sometimes there are things that obscure it. So try to guard your meditation and guard your attitude so that you don’t get discouraged and you don’t get …
- Strong Through Admirable Friendship… The mind becomes more and more transparent to itself. That’s a potential, that’s a possibility, that might not have occurred to us. That’s how admirable friendship is the whole of the holy life, because it opens up possibilities that otherwise might have been closed—particularly given that we’re living in a land of wrong view, and it’s becoming more …
- Give of Yourself… You’ve got to become more and more demanding of yourself. And this is how you do it. You’re willing to fill in the blanks, develop your powers of observation, develop your ingenuity, check things again and again, so that you become a reliable person. That’s when you get the best results out of the Dhamma—by making yourself worthy of the …
- A Trustworthy Mind… That way, the mind becomes its own worst enemy. As it says in the Dhammapada: You can harm yourself more than even your worst enemy can harm you. So trustworthiness starts with conviction in your potential for freedom, in the power of the choices you can make. Then you build on that. That’s how you bring value into the mind. Then, if you …
- Sweat the Small Stuff… How do we become more sensitive? By focusing on the little things: those little movements of the mind that head off in a skillful or unskillful direction. How do you nurture the skillful ones and how do you get rid of the unskillful ones? That’s the big question. So if you’re dealing only with larger abstractions, you’re going to miss the …
- From Compunction to Release… As we’re meditating, we are fabricating a state of becoming. You’re doing an action and you’ve decided it’s worth it. That decision is based on an understanding of karma, fabrication, and a value judgment: that the effort that goes into sitting here looking at the breath night, after night, after night is effort well repaid. The rewards may not be …
- Pissing on Palaces… Then you get sucked into the illusion that, “Well, maybe if I send out a message, I’ll become an important actor, too.” But, actually, the really important things in your life are things that nobody else can know: what you’re doing in your mind. This is important because what you do in the mind then becomes the basis for what you say …
- Skillful Effort… sensual desire, desire for becoming, and desire for non-becoming. Becoming means wanting to take on a particular state, and non-becoming means wanting to annihilate the states you’ve got. But there are lots of other kinds of desire. In particular, the Buddha has you, instead of focusing on wanting to be an enlightened person or to annihilate yourself, just get your “self …
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