Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 49
  2. Circumspection
     … It becomes something under your control. Then he says that you begin to realize that even the state of mind which is now constant, easeful, and under your control—even that has to be let go, again through reflection. You begin to see that even it has its subtle inconstancy, stress, the areas where it’s not fully under your control. But you wouldn … 
  3. Before Your Face Was Born
     … And either extreme can make you miserable because the idea of self, of who you are, becomes the big issue in life. You have to do everything you can to shore it up. Then when you find yourself doing things that are not up to that high standard, you feel like a failure. It’s good to remind yourself that all those issues are … 
  4. Worry
     … You need alertness to notice what has actually happened as the situation changes, becomes unexpected. And you need ardency, the strength to keep on wanting to do things well. Those are precisely the qualities you develop as you meditate. So when worries begin to eat away at your meditation, you have to remind yourself that meditation is actually a much better preparation for the … 
  5. Training Your Minds
     … And it does become a skill. These qualities of mind become stronger. That way, your unskillful mental states, the unskillful desires, that could slip in when there was a lapse in mindfulness or alertness have fewer and fewer openings to slip in. You can see them clearly: “Oh, that desire really doesn’t create any happiness. It’s something I may like, but if … 
  6. Pride
     … It’s one of the last fetters that’s abandoned on the path, along with several of the other fetters that arahants have to get rid of after they become non-returners: passion for form, passion for formlessness, restlessness, and ignorance. There’s a good side to some of these qualities. You need a passion for form and for the formless, for instance, to … 
  7. Mindworms
     … What kind of obsession is it? There’s obsession around conceit, obsession around views, obsession around uncertainty, obsession around two kinds of passion—one is sensual passion, the other is passion for becoming—and then there’s obsession around irritation and obsession around ignorance. So, which have you got? Are you concerned about a view of the world? Are you overtaken with uncertainty about … 
  8. An Apprenticeship in Integrity
     … But the other five have to do with things you can pick up only by being around people of integrity and trying to become a person of integrity yourself. The two qualities you can learn from books or from listening are knowledge of the Dhamma and knowledge of the meaning of the Dhamma. You can learn the Dhamma by listening and by reading, and … 
  9. Sit with It
     … You’re called on at weird hours of the day, weird hours of the night, to take care of a problem, and sometimes the problem is not really clear as to what exactly it is, so you have to sit with the child, talk to the child, talk to yourself in hopes that at some point things will become clear. And it’s the … 
  10. Indulge in the Pleasure of Jhana
     … So you’ve got to become a real connoisseur. Try to be as sensitive as possible to what the sensitive parts of your body get, mostly in the throat and the heart. Other people may find they have other areas. But these are the parts that really need to be nourished. You can breathe energy through them, but if it’s not just right … 
  11. Strength for Stillness
     … As you watch what you’re doing and you notice what’s skillful and unskillful, that use of evaluation and concentration actually becomes an important part of discernment. It’s how the two qualities go together. Ajaan Suwat would often speak of this. He’d say, make it your signal in your mind, something that you keep focusing on: Where is the disturbance? Where … 
  12. Thinking Seriously about Happiness
     … The Buddha calls it “a monk’s wealth.” In other words, when you become a monk, everything you have is somebody else’s gift. If you’ve been a monk for a couple years, every cell in your body is the result of somebody’s generosity, of the food you’ve eaten, as the different cells get replaced. But one thing you do have … 
  13. Open Are the Doors to the Deathless
     … After all those many eons of working for his perfections to become a teaching Buddha, he finally had succeeded. So at that point, he had no responsibilities. But at the end of seven weeks, he reflected: Should he teach? His first impulse was not to. He thought of the difficulty of setting up the Dhamma, setting up the Vinaya, setting up the Sangha. He … 
  14. Eeeels
     … Then, at some point, the process becomes conscious—but by that point, it’s already taken over. What you’re doing as you open up your body to your awareness is that you expand the range of consciousness so that your subconscious gives way. You can actually see these incipient thoughts, these nascent thoughts as they begin to wiggle, to begin to form, and … 
  15. Fire
     … The ducks may actually become a problem themselves. But if you’re alert and mindful, if you’re concentrated and discerning, then you’re much more likely to be able to handle whatever problem comes up. So the best way to deal with the potential for danger is to strengthen the mind. And here you are, meditating. You’re doing precisely the thing that … 
  16. The Long-Distance Meditator
     … Otherwise it just becomes one more thing you think about in the course of the day. You want to make this your home base. Keep reminding yourself that you’re never far away from it. Even when your thoughts go far, far away, they’re thoughts that you’re thinking in the present moment, right here, right now. When you can make that switch … 
  17. At Home in Jhana
     … You can add the second jhana, the third jhāna, and the fourth jhana, so that it becomes a spacious home, especially when you take equanimity of the fourth jhana and apply it to the dimensions of infinite space or infinite consciousness. It’s an enormous home. But everything you need is right here. It’s simply a matter of taking the time and developing … 
  18. Fear of the Truth
     … We find that refuge by developing their qualities, so that the mind becomes a refuge—directly for itself, and indirectly for others. Now, the nature of this refuge is not that it’s simply a place where you run away and hide. It’s like the fortress. You’re there on the frontier, ready to deal with enemies, your own defilements: defilements you’ve … 
  19. Take Responsibility for Yourself
     … If everyone helps one another this way, it becomes a much nicer place to live, and you develop good qualities. I found out after I’d been with Ajaan Fuang for a while, he’d made a comment to someone else when I first went to stay with him. Here was this strange Westerner coming in. He had no idea where I was from … 
  20. The Buddha’s Compassion
     … He spent 45 years setting up the Dhamma, setting up the Vinaya, setting up the monastic Sangha, teaching people to become members of the noble Sangha, so that the Dhamma would last long enough. Here it is, 2,600 years later, and it’s still with us. So, when you take on his teachings as working hypothesis, we should also taking them on with … 
  21. Mindful & Grateful for Lessons in Freedom
     … But as it happens, the more you’re used to this level of ease in the mind, the more sensitive you become and the more demanding you become as to what really counts as well-being. You begin to see that, even in the various levels of jhana, there’s still some stress. As the Buddha points out, we don’t have to just … 
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