Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 49
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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.
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. Forgiveness
     … That karma becomes theirs. Then you reflect on the fact that you don’t want to have any animosity toward anybody at all when you die. This is one of the Buddha’s first recommendations: Just keep reflecting on the fact that we’re all in the process of dying here, so what’s accomplished by throwing more mud? It’s like the Buddha … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. Resolute Good Humor
     … He went on to become a famous composer, but in his student days, there was one piece that he composed where it was just unrelenting noise, unrelenting ugliness. He said that was its purpose. But I found, listening to it, that I just tuned out. In the same way, the mind, when it’s put under a lot of pressure, just tunes out. It … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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