Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Self-doubts
     … Well, you as you are right now won’t make it to the end, but as you follow the path you will become a different person. The change will be gradual. The Buddha compares it to a hammer that you use every day. You’ve seen other hammers getting worn down, and you realize that each time you use your hammer, it’s worn … 
  3. Seeing with the Body
     … As we inhabit it, the body itself becomes an organ of vision, an organ of sight. You see things going on in the body you didn’t see before. You re-sensitize the body. As a meditator you work from a new center of gravity so that when you start taking apart your habits of creating your sense of self — the habits that make … 
  4. The Rewards of Stream Entry
     … I realized that I would have to become a better person.” Well, that’s the whole point. The Buddha’s teachings are here to make you a better person, because in becoming a better person, you’re in a better position to put an end to suffering. When you observe the precepts, the mind is more at peace with itself. There may be some … 
  5. Appropriate Attention, Appropriate Intention
     … Then it becomes an issue of learning how to understand your mind: What does your mind like to settle down with? Concentration is not meant to be a process of forcing yourself to stay with something that you don’t like. You need to have a sense of pleasure in order for your mind to settle down here willingly. So find an object that … 
  6. What’s Real
     … This is why we have to train the mind, so that it’s not going to create suffering for itself, not going to create worlds of becoming. Just because these worlds are created doesn’t mean that they’re illusory, but it does mean they’re fabricated. And everything that’s fabricated, as the Buddha said, is stressful. The solution ultimately will be not … 
  7. The Uses of Concentration
     … Everything just becomes food or non-food, and you gobble the food right down; sometimes you gobble the non-food down as well. Whereas if you can allow the mind to enjoy a sense of wellbeing simply in the way you breathe, simply in the way you inhabit the body, you can look more objectively at what used to serve as food. You find … 
  8. Sensitivity Through Generosity
     … That’s an important lesson, and it’s the way in which you become sensitive to one another. We all become sensitive to one another this way. This is something that’s really lacking, especially now as computers are taking over people’s lives. People grow up with computers; they don’t grow up with people any more. They’re more comfortable looking at … 
  9. Rhythms of the Mind
     … Walking becomes easier. Those are the two things to keep in mind: be sensitive and try to be efficient. If you see you’re doing something that’s not necessary for keeping your mind still, let it go. It’s an unnecessary burden. The texts give some ideas about what you let go as you settle down. There’s that one passage in Majjhima … 
  10. Asalha Puja
     … craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. These are the things that cause us to cling in ways that create suffering. The structure of the truths is then that it’s possible to put an end to that clinging by putting an end to the craving. That’s the third noble truth. You do it by developing the noble eightfold path … 
  11. Lessons in Fabrication
     … This is why the Buddha traced the causes in the mind that lead to becoming. As he said, whatever craving leads to becoming is going to lead to suffering. You can trace it back all the way to a process that the Buddha calls fabrication. Saṅkhāra is the Pali term. These are the things we do to put together our experience of the present … 
  12. Guardian Meditations
     … That way, the meditation as a whole will become more and more of a skill, not simply a matter of going out and shooting birds at night up in the dark when you can’t see anything, where everything is hit or miss. It becomes more and more of a skill where you have a definite sense of your own mind: what it needs … 
  13. The Three Perceptions as Tools
     … After all, we’re here to not be lazy, to commit ourselves to the practice of concentration, to reflect on the practice of concentration as we’re committed to it so that it becomes a skill. It’s interesting: that pairing of commitment and reflection appears again and again in the Canon, but it often goes unnoticed. It starts with the teachings to Rahula … 
  14. Your Territory
     … It’s one of the ways in which we modulate from being focused on the breath into other states of becoming and we go traveling around. But here you don’t want to travel. You want to settle in. Because states of becoming are places you can’t really stay. You travel for a while and then they run out. Either they simply disintegrate … 
  15. The Lessons of Good Kamma
     … This is how you become honest. This is how you become even more observant. This is how you make good use of the teaching on kamma. Instead of getting upset about things you’ve done in the past, you say, “Look, I can focus on the present moment and that’ll make all the difference.” That way, you can learn from what you do … 
  16. Determined to Be Undefeated by Death
     … Otherwise, when the mind settles down and things of the day, or things of the past week, the past month start coming up and you think of so-and-so who did this and so-and-so who did that, and they become “that so-and-so,” then you get all entangled. Or there may be worries about what somebody might do or what … 
  17. Long-Term Welfare
     … It all becomes very negative. But if you’re coming from the point of view based on the strength of concentration, with a strong sense of well-being, you can look at these other things you used to chase after, and you realize that you don’t really want to anymore. They’re not worth it. You find it a lot easier to let … 
  18. The Five Faculties Confirmed
     … But there’s also a happiness that comes from being convinced that you can become a noble human being. As you sense that nobility developing through your right efforts, you see that you’re developing a fund of knowledge that you can apply to develop skillful qualities to a greater and greater degree. You can remember the things you’ve learned from the past … 
  19. Self-Starting
     … People are usually fascinated with becoming, but at the time of a Buddha there would be people who would be fascinated with the idea of going beyond becoming. So, the fact that we’re practicing is unusual. It’s not normal. It’s not ordinary. The ordinary way of the world is just to keep going around and around. The idea of getting out … 
  20. The End of Uncertainty
     … See what you can do to minimize the stress, for only when you learn how to minimize the stress that you can see, do you start becoming sensitive to the subtler levels. In this way you learn how to be a connoisseur of your actions, and particularly a connoisseur of actions and events in the mind. A connoisseur of food has to develop a … 
  21. The Sublime Attitudes
     … Only when you work through the particulars like this can goodwill become more and more limitless. That’s when your compassion can become limitless as well. If you feel goodwill for people, then when they’re suffering the ill effects of their bad karma you can’t help but have compassion for them. You want them not only to stop experiencing whatever pain or … 
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