Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Mud Houses
     … But when you’re trying to get the mind concentrated, you see how you put this state of becoming together with precisely these activities. You also find that you ultimately reach a limit as to how far you can go as you hold on to these activities. Then you turn around and look at the rest of your life. You realize that your sense … 
  3. Creating a World of Concentration
     … That word bhavana is related to the word bhava, which means becoming—a state of mind. It’s a particular state in which you take on an identity in a particular world of experience. We create all kinds of worlds as we go through the day. And night: Think about all your different thought worlds, dream worlds when you sleep. Well, we’re creating … 
  4. The Buddha’s Vipassana
     … But if you take them on, suddenly they become your present karma, and that’s what you want to look into. When something starts turning into a story, you’re implicated. So you have to ask yourself, “Why did you want to get involved?” And then you notice when whatever it was that you thought you were getting out of it no longer interests … 
  5. The Path of Questions
     … You have to train your whole approach to life. “What’s the most skillful thing to do right now? What’s the most skillful thing to say? What’s the most skillful thing to think?” Learn how to keep asking these questions, looking for the answers, learning from your mistakes time and again, so that you gradually do become more skillful on the outer … 
  6. Bare Attention
     … That’s how your attention becomes healing attention, compassionate attention. It’s well-informed, well-motivated. It’s not “bare” at all. So learn to inform your intention and inform your attention—both by becoming familiar with the Buddha’s teaching and by looking in your own mind and seeing what works. After all, where does the Buddha’s teaching come from? It comes … 
  7. Investigative Work
     … We don’t just sit here and watch and let everything become clear on its own. One of the things we’ve got to learn how to do is to get some control over our thoughts, get the mind as quiet as possible, because we’re so constantly bombarded by thoughts that we don’t have any opportunity to see the thoughts clearly. It … 
  8. Borrowing the Buddha’s Wisdom
     … It’s in following them that we become a better and better judge of whether things are working or not. I remember reading an article one time printed in the New York Times—so it was supposed to be reliable—by a person who was saying, “I tried mindfulness a couple times, and it didn’t work.” Well, one, were they really mindful? And … 
  9. A Sense of Direction
     … In other words, if you see everybody else in the world as being selfish or thoughtless, it’s very easy for you to become selfish and thoughtless as well. So for your own well-being you have to go to the trouble of looking for the good points of other people, even the ones that you don’t like, even the ones who’ve … 
  10. Controlling
     … This means that, instead of becoming less controlling as you develop as a meditator, you’re becoming more wisely controlling: putting together the raft that will take you across the river, making it out of the branches and twigs and leaves that are on this shore, tying it together as best you can, all the while knowing that the raft may fall apart at … 
  11. Clinging & Feeding
     … This, I found when I went to Thailand, was one of the more liberating parts about becoming a monk. Back when I was in college, you were expected to have opinions on every topic that people might bring up. Whereas over there, being a monk, it wasn’t necessary. In fact, it was frowned on—lots of unnecessary discussions. So you want to focus … 
  12. One Thing Clear Through
     … It becomes just a natural expression of the mind. All the steps of the practice become a natural expression of the mind once it’s fully trained.
  13. The Duty to Be Positive
     … As the Buddha said, when you start getting too obsessed with measuring yourself against other people, that’s when your goodness becomes a burden. It actually becomes an obstacle on the path. So learn how to reflect in a way that gives energy to your practice, that heightens your heedfulness. You need strength to face this difficult path, and part of the strength comes … 
  14. Two Kinds of Middle
     … In other words, the pleasure becomes a basis for understanding a lot of the mind’s strange perceptions, replacing them with new perceptions, trying out new perceptions to see how they fit. This is how you get off your normal continuum. Ask a different question. Look at things from a different way. Get outside the box. Pleasure is something you can actually use as … 
  15. All Eye
     … Our attention gets cast outside, outside, and the body becomes unknown territory, like those old maps where they just had the outlines of the continents, surrounding huge blank spaces where they wrote across, “Here be tygers.” Well, there will be tigers inside your body if you don’t get to know the body really well, because there will be places for your defilements to … 
  16. Sophisticated Dhamma
     … If they’re insistent in holding to their lies, people began to wonder, “Who’s telling the truth?” Then it becomes an issue of this person’s version versus that person’s version. The conviction that you really are listening to the truth, that you definitely have the facts, gets weaker and weaker. When that conviction gets weaker, then it has its toll on … 
  17. More than Just Letting Go
     … All the three kinds of fabrication that he says we do in ignorance get brought up to the surface and become the center of our attention as we meditate. What is bodily fabrication? It’s the in-and-out breath. Verbal fabrication, technically is called directed thought and evaluation. It’s basically the sentences with which you talk to yourself. You direct your thoughts … 
  18. Mindful of Your Potentials
     … We become more and more sensitive to the fact that there’s an energy suffusing the body. It’s connected with the in-and-out breath, but there’s also a background, cosmic hum in the body. As you pay more attention to it, it comes to the fore. When you get really good at this, you realize: How could you have not seen … 
  19. Skilled in Leaving Concentration
     … It’s in this way that the meditation becomes a skill. You’re not just shooting birds in the dark. You begin to gain a sense of your stillness of mind. And you may also begin to sense that the way your mind settles down will really vary from time to time; that you don’t have just one spot where you tend to … 
  20. Worries & Regrets
     … Try to cut the connections between the words and the mind so that they become gibberish. Scramble the signal. But there are other times when that’s not enough. That’s when you have to develop the right attitude toward the topic that’s distracting you. The Buddha didn’t teach just a meditation technique. He also taught attitudes to go along with the … 
  21. Using What You’ve Got
     … It’s like becoming a good cook. If you want to learn about eggs, you don’t just sit and look at eggs. You crack them open and put them in a pot or a pan. You boil them. You fry them. You make scrambled eggs. You try making scrambled eggs over high heat and then over low heat and see the difference. You … 
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