Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- Strength Training… Otherwise it simply becomes an exercise in vanity. You want to take that strength and put it to use so that you really benefit from it in your daily life and in other sports, because in the course of putting it to use in daily life, you begin to realize that there are still some areas where you’re weak and you need practice …
- Comprehending Pain… craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. Knowing that these are the things that give rise to stress: That’s the first knowledge. The second knowledge is knowing that your duty is to abandon these things. And the third knowledge would be knowing that that you’ve completed the duty: Those three forms of craving have been totally abandoned. The third …
- Developing Discernment… Anyone—that’s the implication— anyone who becomes ardent, resolute, and heedful can develop these qualities, too. So think about what that means for you. True happiness is possible if you work at it. This conviction gives rise to discernment in the sense that you take the arising and passing away of suffering seriously. You take your actions seriously. And you take that possibility …
- The World of the Body… We’ve got this body that we can use to practice, and we can learn how to understand how the mind causes itself suffering by examining the body, by staying with the breath, trying to be centered here in the body, because it’s right in here where things are going to become clear. When you’re focused on the breath, you’re right …
- Capable… Devas come to see him and tell him, “Set your mind on becoming a universal monarch.” He asks them, “Why do you say that?” They say they have two reasons: One is that he’s a virtuous person, and it would be good to have a virtuous person in a position of power in the world. The second reason is that, because he is …
- The Buddha’s Wisdom… These are the practices that help you become more sensitive to what’s going on in your mind, to help get rid of that ignorance so that you can see exactly where you’re causing yourself suffering and where you don’t have to. He recommends the practice of virtue, beginning with the five precepts, giving you something new to tell yourself: Watch out …
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