Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Learning from What You Do… Of course, once you focus on the breath, it’s going to become both an automatic process and not an automatic process. As soon as you bring attention to it, your intentions about the breath are going to get involved. So it becomes a really good laboratory for testing your intentions. Your first intention might be: What kind of breathing feels best right now …
- Shoulds & Desires… All that activity you should and should not do is also about directing your desires, because the craving that leads to suffering—craving for sensuality, becoming, and non-becoming—doesn’t cover all the possible desires there are. There are also the desires to be skillful, to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. That’s in the other half of the four noble …
- The Identity Crutch… For instance, how many times have you heard the idea that when you become a meditator, you shouldn’t build an identity around being a meditator? Well, there are some areas where it’s unhealthy to build identity around being a meditator: You think, “Here I am, I’m a meditator. I’ve been meditating all these years, but my mind can still crash …
- Goodwill as Wealth… When you can think in this way, your goodwill becomes really strong, and the sense of well-being that comes with that goodwill becomes strong as well. So develop inner wealth like this and then invest it by spreading it around. And you find that it grows to the point where you really can depend on it.
- Do. Maintain. Use.… Keep everything in reference to the breath as much as you can, and you’ll find that you can maintain this state of concentration for longer and longer periods of time, until it becomes your default mode. It feels natural to be here. The center of gravity shifts. The real test for your concentration, though, comes when you have to leave the monastery or …
- Think Your Way to Stillness… The skill here is getting the mind to be with the breath in a way that the breath energy is nourishing for the whole body, and can become nourishing for the whole mind. Because we’re trying to develop a concentration that is centered but all-around. All the Buddha’s images for right concentration talk about full body, full body, full body. There …
- Right Next to Ignorance… Craving for becoming, wanting to take on an identity in this world so that you can get pleasures out of the world. And then craving for non-becoming: You find that your identity is not working well, so you want to destroy it. All those kinds of craving are to be abandoned. The cessation is to be realized. And the cessation is defined, basically …
- Meaning & Importance… When you think in those terms, your faculty of memory becomes an aid in the practice and not a hindrance. It becomes part of right view and right mindfulness. But it does require putting aside the particularity of your memories: “This happened at that time, you said this, you said that, they said this, they said that.” Those are scraps. Don’t let yourself …
- The Escape of Discipline… If I want true happiness, I’ve got to go out and become a monk.” And whether or not we want to become monks or nuns ourselves: the important thing for all of us is that he knew he had to look inside, had to train his mind to be reliable. Because you look at your mind and there’s thinking all over the …
- The Path is Fabricated… As one thinker said, he went out in nature and allowed himself to become a giant eyeball, transparent in all directions, soaking up all the of inter-connectedness. That idea is stuck in our society, so that now, when Buddhism comes to the West, we read the different definitions of mindfulness, and the spacious and receptive ones are the ones that seems to strike …
- Basic Breath, Basic Insight… It becomes mechanical or forced, which is a sign that the body’s oxygen needs and breathing needs and energy needs have changed. So adjust things again. Then, when you’ve found something good, just stay with it. If the mind wanders off, bring it back gently but firmly. In other words, you don’t yank it back and scold it. But at the …
- Potentials for Energy… That becomes your refuge as unskillful qualities keep coming at you. The important point is to realize that you do have these potentials inside you. When they talk about accepting the present moment, if you really accept the present moment, you accept the fact that there are potentials here: potentials you can work with. After all, this is what the art of meditation is …
- Your Gyroscope… When you learn to be generous with material things, that becomes a quality of generosity in the mind. When you use your status to help other people, that becomes a quality of compassion. The qualities you develop are the only things that really stay with you, even past death. When you meet with praise and criticism, you can develop the wisdom of looking at …
- What Made the Buddha Exclaim… One, is a sense of awe at the Dhamma, how amazingly good the Dhamma is, and how when people are trained in the Dhamma how amazing they become as well. This gives rise to a sense of confidence that this really is a good path with a really good goal. The other thing that makes him exclaim is a sense of samvega. He sees …
- Be Bigger Than Your Pains… The simple fact that the breath is coming in and out becomes your signal. It becomes your reminder—stay right here, stay right here—because right here is where all the important things are happening. Your intentions are happening right here, and the choice as to whether you’re going to go with a particular intention is happening right here as well. There are …
- What Are You Doing?… Our states of becoming come from within. So we have to turn around and look at this problem inside: “What is your mind doing?” No matter what the problem is, the problem that makes the mind suffer is something the mind is doing. This is why, in the practice of mindfulness, alertness means that you’re in the present moment not watching just whatever …
- Imagine… You’re creating a state of becoming — the Pali word here is bhava — and although one of the things we’re trying to learn to overcome is the process of becoming, we can’t simply drop the process. We have to understand it before we can let it go. We have to understand it to the point of dispassion and then let go. To …
- A Load of Straw… Once you’ve developed these attitudes, then when thoughts that go against these principles come into the mind, you’ll catch them more quickly, see them more easily, and in this way these attitudes become a basis for good concentration, a basis for developing stillness within the mind. Of course there are cases where people are suffering and you can’t do anything to …
- Stupid about Pleasure… Because of that sense of security, it’s possible for a stream-enterer to become complacent — to say nothing of people who’ve simply experienced jhana, or right concentration. Just the fact that you’ve encountered the really refined pleasures of right concentration doesn’t mean that you automatically let go of your attachments to other forms of pleasure. The principle of both/and …
- Disenchantment… Bhava means a state of being, becoming, the process of becoming, which is a combination of past karma plus our present karma. But then bhuta means things as they’ve come to be: the raw material that comes in from the past before we’ve added our hype, added our salt-and-pepper and mustard and ketchup to make it what we want. The …
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