Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. A Sense of Yourself
     … This is one area where, if you want to learn how to trust yourself, you really have to work to become more and more effective at talking yourself into doing things that you know are right even though you don’t want to do them; and to talk yourself out of doing things that you know are wrong, but you like doing them. And … 
  3. No One in Charge
     … The question then becomes: What kind of happiness do you want out of this pattern? Where will you find satisfaction? Where will you find fulfillment? As the Buddha said, fulfillment comes from letting go. Several of the ajaans have said that the practice is basically one thing clear through. It starts with generosity and it ends with total letting go. But you also have … 
  4. Relaxing into the Body
     … As you become more sensitive, the sense of the body becomes more refined, and that’s when the mind and body can interpenetrate. That’s how you settle down without having to push things together. You simply allow them to interpenetrate, and there they are. When they’re there together, they give each other strength. Ajaan Lee’s image is that you’re like … 
  5. Consciousness, Name, & Form
     … If you add your sense of “you” to it all, then it becomes a state of becoming. For the time being, you don’t want to go there. See these mental events simply as events, so that you can see how ephemeral they are, how quick they are to change. And you begin to wonder how you thought you could build anything solid on … 
  6. Good & Bad Meditation
     … So this is where having a sense of good and bad meditation finally does become useful. In one sense, every meditation is good if you bring the right attitude to it, regarding it as an opportunity to learn. With that approach, bad is bad only in the sense that a particular line of reasoning doesn’t go where you want it, or a particular … 
  7. Delusion Concentration
     … That’s when you can simply become one with the breath. The breath, the pleasure, and your awareness all seem to become one entity. As long as you can maintain your alertness and mindfulness while you do that, you’re fine. The problem is that people like to go right there without taking the mindfulness and alertness along. They just drift off. The image … 
  8. A Slave to Craving
     … It’s going to become a piece of meat itself. A lot of these images are pretty harsh. I know a lot of people don’t like them, because they really want to stay stuck on their old pleasures. But when you come from a different position, there is something really gratifying about listening to those images. It confirms what you’ve already seen … 
  9. Four Noble Truths to One
     … What are the events that lead up to the craving? The Buddha said that the craving that leads to becoming is what causes us to suffer. Becoming is our sense of who we are in a world of experience. We can’t disentangle ourselves from that sense of who we are in the world, or from the craving, until we see that the whole … 
  10. To Be Worthy of the Dhamma
     … That’s how you become worthy of the practice. I was reading a piece today by a board member of a Buddhist organization talking about how the Dhamma has to change. He said, “Yes, the Dhamma is timeless, but/and”—he had both “but” and “and”—“it’s got to meet people’s needs.” Well, they want to meet people’s wants, and they … 
  11. Suffering Comes from Those You Love
     … A relationship that was once so close now becomes very far away. You think about this and you begin to get a sense of the meaninglessness of it all. We’re kind and good to one another, but the thirst for that kind of relationship is just is a thirst for more and more suffering. It’s good to think about these things because … 
  12. True, Beneficial, Timely
     … One day a prince, Prince Abhaya, went to see them, and they asked him, “Do you want to become famous? We have a trick question for you to ask Gotama the contemplative. Ask him if he would ever say anything displeasing to other people. He won’t be able to answer Yes, he won’t be able to answer No, because if he answers … 
  13. The Larger Picture
     … Sometimes when you live with nothing but your problems, they loom very large in the mind and they become overwhelming. But if you see them in light of the problems of all living beings in all directions, it’s strange, but it makes your own problems easier to bear and gives you a better handle on how to deal with them. We can take … 
  14. Evaluating the Practice
     … It’s through developing this factor that you become a more and more reliable meditator, and also a more reliable friend to yourself. You can look after yourself with more ease. Instead of just running with whatever comes into the mind, you learn to step back and ask yourself, “What am I doing? What are the results of what I’m doing? Where could … 
  15. Reflections on Kamma
     … Even when you become a great pro, you still have to keep your eye on the ball. In the same way, when you practice, keep your eye on your actions, because that’s where everything will become clear.
  16. The Skills of Stillness
     … All the other skills you need to know about becoming happy, truly happy, will come from here. That’s what’s special about the Buddha’s teachings. He teaches happiness not as a crapshoot or a gamble. He teaches it as a skill. And as with all skills, you have to practice it again and again, and watch yourself as you do it. You … 
  17. Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising
     … Dependent Co-arising October 23, 2006 The Pali word for the worlds we create in the mind is bhava, which literally means becoming. We keep creating these worlds. If you look at dependent co-arising, you see that they’re based on two things. The immediate prerequisite is clinging, upadana; and clinging in turn is based on craving, tanha. But both of those words … 
  18. Discernment in Concentration
     … In other words, you’re playing with perceptions, and you become very self-aware about playing with perceptions. In that way, you begin to notice connections. If you just randomly think this, think that, without being self-aware about it, you might be able to get the mind to settle down, but then you don’t have any knowledge about how you did it … 
  19. A Simple Path Through a Complex Map
     … It appears again right after contact at the senses, and then again right after becoming, in the suffering of aging, illness, and death. Perception appears in fabrication and again in name and form. In some formulations, it also comes after the feeling that follows on contact. Some people have said, “The Buddha didn’t understand causality. He was way too sloppy.” Actually, though, he … 
  20. Expert’s Mind
     … You’re putting yourself in a really good place to observe the mind, and as you observe it you find that you can also train it in various directions so that its intentions and views become more and more skillful. After all, the way we cause suffering is through our intentions, while the path to the end of suffering is also a martialing of … 
  21. Truthful & Observant
     … This is why the path is both gradual and sudden—gradual in the sense that it takes time to become more observant, but sudden in the sense that when you see something, it’s not as if you had to dig down deep into something far away. It’s something that’s been right here all along. When your powers of observation are up … 
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