Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 47
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Being Responsible
     … We become a refuge for ourselves and then, on the external level, we become a good example for others as to how they can build a refuge for themselves as well. So even though we see a lot of people setting bad examples right now, it gives us all the more reason for us to set good examples. At the very least, it’ll … 
  17. King Asoka’s Vow
     … He didn’t want to dedicate it to become a king again. What he wanted instead was to have a capability within himself. That’s a literal translation of the Thai. You might say he wanted to have the ability to depend on himself. You can imagine that, as king, he had to depend on a lot of other people. Reading the edicts, you … 
  18. Bowing & Chanting
     … They become more and more habitual, then as you get older, which means that as you approach death, these are the things that’ll be running through your mind—or at least there’s a good chance they’ll be. You want to counteract a lot of the messages of the world. After all, what is their message? The good things in the world … 
  19. Beyond Likes & Dislikes
     … What do we miss out on when we do that, given that so much of the practice goes against the grain? We like to create little worlds for ourselves — this is called the effluent of becoming that comes fermenting up in the mind — and we’re really good at it. We can create all kinds of worlds: beautiful worlds, ugly worlds, delightful worlds, horrible … 
  20. From Grief to Compassion
     … Beings in these categories are suffering, but they can know of the merit being dedicated to them, and if they appreciate it then that becomes their merit, and that makes them happy—and might possibly get them to a better place. Ajaan Fuang had a student who started seeing visions of hungry ghosts, and they were all over the place: in doorways, under stairways … 
  21. You’ll Wish You’d Meditated More
     … You’ve got to learn how to see the stages it goes through, because that’s how you’re going to understand becoming. That’s how you’re going to understand the craving and clinging that lead to becoming, the things that you’re doing that create suffering where you don’t have to. So you want to be mindful to remember when you … 
  22. Load next page...