Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 51
  2. The World Is Swept Away
     … It becomes more and more habitual that once there’s a craving, once there’s a desire, you’ve got to satisfy it. And when you think of how things are inconstant, stressful, and not-self, and how you yourself are subject to aging, illness and death, there’s no end to it all. There’s never a point of satisfaction. Even death doesn … 
  3. Judging Your Efforts
     … This is where two qualities become very important. One quality, ardency, is mentioned under the teachings on right mindfulness. As Ajaan Lee points out in the context of right mindfulness, ardency is the wisdom factor, which is interesting because you sometimes hear that sampajañña, alertness, is the wisdom factor. But that’s not the case: The wisdom lies in wanting and trying to do … 
  4. Questioning Your Conviction
     … As he said, your lower lip never pushed way up to become your upper lip. Your hand never became a foot. Your foot never became an eye. In his explanations of the three characteristics, he says, “Before you’re really going to understand inconstancy, stress, and not-self, you have to take what’s inconstant and make it constant. You take what’s stressful … 
  5. Change
     … But the become more manageable when you can remember your true aims and the tools to realize them. That’s your foundation. We begin building that foundation when, through conviction, we pick up the discernment from the Buddha and his noble disciples and we try to remember it. Then, as we see that that discernment really does work in our lives, it becomes more … 
  6. The Treasure Hunt
     … The insight would become your own because it’s something you discovered. You noticed things that you didn’t notice before. What else do you think Awakening would be? It’s not that the skies open and some god comes down bearing a message, or some light beam comes down, from the outside. And it’s not something you can clone from what you … 
  7. The Uses of Right Concentration
     … You use the concentration to put an end to the mental effluents of sensuality, becoming, and ignorance. To do that, you want to see the origination and the passing away of the five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, fabrications, and consciousness. On the surface this may sound like the same sort of thing as developing mindfulness and alertness, but the word “origination” here signals something … 
  8. A Sense of Yourself
    In the sutta we chanted just now, the Buddha teaches not-self to a group of monks who are on the verge of becoming arahants. But it’s not a teaching just for people on the verge of awakening. When he taught his son meditation, even before he taught him breath meditation, he taught him the perception of not-self. Right at the very … 
  9. Stepping Back
     … We use the organ to think, but if the organ is damaged in any way, out of balance in any way, then our thoughts become our enemies. And what are you going to do then? If you have enough mindfulness to pull yourself out of your thought worlds, you’re safe. If you have enough mindfulness to pull yourself out of anything the mind … 
  10. Fixing the Present
     … What kind of breathing will help maintain that sense of “okay” in the body, and allow it to deepen?—so that it becomes more and more pleasant, more and more like the sort of place you really would want to stay until you get a sensation that would feel good to bathe the body in and let it spread all around. That’s like … 
  11. Encourage Yourself
     … You take heart from the fact that there have been people who’ve been worse off than you and they’ve become arahants—many, many, many people like this in the past. So try not to set a time limit on how quickly you want results to happen. Just make sure that the needle of your compass is pointing in the right direction. And … 
  12. Three Levels of Concentration
     … When you fall asleep, things get still and then you just let go totally, let go of all your mindfulness, all your alertness, and move off into another stage of becoming, as the texts call it. Whatever little dream world happens to appear in the mind as we fall asleep, that’s becoming in action, and it’s usually in this state of threshold … 
  13. A Friend When You’re on Your Own
     … In a forest monastery, it was also how you deal with work projects so that they can all become part of the training of the mind. You realize more and more that the training is really a matter of apprenticeship, hanging around somebody, picking up their attitudes and skills, because it’s not just the verbal knowledge. It’s also the knowledge of an … 
  14. The Precepts
     … It becomes your first priority. And you take the skills that you’ve learned—not only in meditation, but also the skills you’ve learned about generosity, the skills you’ve learned about virtue—and you put them to use. And these are skills. We tend to think about the precepts as Sunday school rules, but they’re not. They’re skills that you … 
  15. Safety All Around
     … craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. And even though suffering in and of itself isn’t noble, craving isn’t noble, his truths about these things are noble, because they force you to question your attachments, question your thirst. You step back. That’s the beginning of dispassion. Dispassion comes from noticing that the things you’re doing are causing … 
  16. Equanimity in Action, Equanimity at Rest
     … That can actually become a factor of jhana. When directed thought and evaluation are listed as a factor of jhana, they seem exotic and strange. Some people say, “How do I start directing my thoughts, and how do I evaluate?” Well, you’re doing these things all the time. You think about a topic: That’s directing your thoughts. You make comments on it … 
  17. The Limits of Control
     … But if you allow the mind to settle down and be still, things become a lot clearer. You can see the subtle movements of the mind: where its movements cause stress, where they don’t cause stress, or at least where they reduce the amount of stress you’ve been experiencing. So in this practice, we’re pushing against those characteristics of inconstancy, stress … 
  18. Delight in Striving
     … If the Buddha had us just accept suffering, he himself would have gone back to the palace and never would have become a Buddha. If he had accepted aging, illness, and death, he wouldn’t have found the deathless. These are things about which most people say, “We just have to put up with it. There’s going to be aging in life. There … 
  19. Why Mindfulness
     … Not only that, you can work with the breath so that it becomes a good, comfortable place to stay. It gives you a sense of ease, a sense of well-being, so that you don’t have to go for the gratification that comes from pursuing your thought worlds. You’re not hungry all the time. We work with the breath to create a … 
  20. Restraint
     … Traditionally, it has also become a time when lay people decide to make a determination, too: Whatever kind of goodness they want to develop, they give themselves three months to do it. So look at your life: What kind of goodness are you lacking? Use this opportunity to try to make up the lack. It could be in terms of generosity, virtue, or meditation … 
  21. Knowing & Acting
     … That’s when it becomes **your **meditation. You’re not just learning about Buddhism. You’re using the process of meditation to learn about yourself, so that you can see in what ways that your thoughts and deeds are not skillful—where you create suffering for yourself, create suffering for others—and then you can make a change. That’s because you’re not … 
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