Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. The Broken Gong
     … Something gets amplified, magnified, copied again and again, and becomes an obsession. Of course, in the time of the Buddha, they didn’t have Zoom meetings, but they did have gongs. The Buddha says, ideally, you want to make your mind like a broken gong. People can hit it, but there’s no reverberation. It’s not a very pretty image, but it makes … 
  3. In a World of Crooked Wheels
     … You see that the rest of the world has no concern for virtue anymore, no concern for right view, and if you let their skepticism become your skepticism, then you’re finished. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can hold on to these things, and because you hold on to them, they protect you. Remember the Buddha’s saying, that … 
  4. Dispassion
     … for sensuality, for becoming, and for non-becoming. You try to develop dispassion for these cravings so that you can abandon them. The third noble truth is dispassion itself. The only truth that involves some passion is the path. You’ve got to have some passion to develop it. It’s something you have to put together, to construct. And to construct it well … 
  5. For What It’s Worth
     … If the narrative of your life leading up to the meditation is not all that good, then this just becomes one more part of that bad narrative: that you can’t get it together, you can’t do this right. But if you’re coming with a sense of well-being, a sense of competence and confidence, then it’s easy to take these … 
  6. Believing & Knowing
     … We keep up our persistence and try to become more mindful, further our powers of concentration, and even when we gain psychic powers, it’s still just the scratch marks high up in the trees. It’s still not proof. I’ve told you of that story of the woman who was a student of Ajaan Fuang who started developing a sense of where … 
  7. Not-self Is a Value Judgment
     … And it is true that when the Buddha taught people to let go of everything, to learn to identify nothing at all as self, he was speaking largely to people who were on the verge of becoming arahants—people who’d followed the path, all the activities of the path, and now were ready to let go of those activities and any sense of … 
  8. Dhamma Is a Quality of the Heart
     … When he died, the Buddha said that if he had gone forth and started practicing early in life, he would have become an arahant. If he’d gone forth in the middle of his life, he would have become a non-returner, a stream enterer. In other words, he could have guaranteed that he wouldn’t have to fall to lower realms. But he … 
  9. The Six Properties
     … Floods can come but then everything can dry up and become a desert. Sea levels rise and fall. Fires can sweep through huge areas of wilderness and then go totally out. Windstorms can come and then there are days when there’s no wind at all— when, as they say, “Even the grass ends in the thatch don’t move.” So when the large … 
  10. Determined to be Happy
     … That’s how your intentions become better. You try to bring discernment to your choice of a goal—trying to choose a goal that’s going to put the mind at peace—and then you’re true in carrying out what you see as the most discerning path, and true in relinquishing whatever gets in the way. This is how you attain what you … 
  11. Mindful Judgment
     … But when you train it with right view, and get it properly established with the right qualities so that it becomes right mindfulness, then it becomes the crucial factor in learning how to judge things as to what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate, for any particular time and place. After all, judgment is not just a matter of holding standards in mind in a … 
  12. Fighting off Ignorance
     … So the more you exercise qualities like mindfulness, alertness, and ardency, the stronger they become. Then you start using your powers of evaluation: How does the breath feel? Do you like the way it feels? How about if you breathed in a different way? Ajaan Lee recommends starting out with some good, long, deep in-and-out breaths. In other words, very consciously make … 
  13. Concentration: A Balancing Act
     … We can see that, as we work on developing skillful actions, we do really become more skillful. That induces us to want to get the mind to settle down. So you focus on the breath. You try to get the mind in a state where it fills the body. Concentration is sometimes defined as cittass’ekaggata: singleness of mind. That ekaggata is a term … 
  14. The Will to Awaken
     … You have to want them to be true in order for them to become true. If you’re going to become a good pianist, a good carpenter, you have to want those things in order for them to happen. It helps if you have some natural inclination in that direction or some natural talents. But to be really good, you have to have a … 
  15. To Know the Buddha
     … They hover around your actions so that you do become skillful. And the act of becoming skillful in and of itself is pleasant, as you get a better and better sense of how you can breathe, talk to yourself, focus on feelings and perceptions, putting things together in a better and better way. You start using these aggregates as a fruitful path rather than … 
  16. Faith
     … Because as we practice, after all, we’re taking on a state of becoming. There are things that we have to do, qualities we have to develop. And to develop those qualities requires that you have a certain amount of desire and a sense that you live in a world where that desire makes sense; and that you’re the kind of person who … 
  17. Part III : Daily Life
     … It’s in this way that your practice becomes akāliko, timeless, where you don’t just shut it off into a few minutes here, a few minutes there. Every time throughout the day becomes a time to nourish the mind, keep it nourished, keep it strong, keep it well centered, well established. This is how you take care of your most precious resources and … 
  18. In Charge of Your World
     … The teachings talk about becoming: It’s basically your sense of the world in which you live, and your identity within that world. That becoming is based on your actions. Your actions are the field in which a particular sense of the world can grow. You keep on doing things that you know are good, and that creates a good field. The possibilities in … 
  19. Learning by Doing
     … Then you learn more by making yourself more alert, more mindful so that you become a more reliable judge of what’s good enough. So we learn from the concentration, we learn from the ardency that goes into this. Of those three qualities that the Buddha recommends for mindfulness practice, and which also slough over into concentration practice—the mindfulness, alertness and ardency—ardency … 
  20. The Importance of Being Focused
     … This way, the mind, instead of being its own enemy, becomes its own friend—and a friend to other people, too. If there’s somebody you have to help in an emergency, you can focus totally on what needs to be done. As for the things that can’t be done or can’t be helped, you don’t get worked up over them … 
  21. Steering the Raft
     … Other people say, “Identify yourself with the world at large, or the spirit behind the world at large, and let it have its way.” But that kind of self becomes meaningless. You’re defining self with something over which you have no control. And to deprive the sense of self from any sense of control makes it meaningless. So what do you do? The … 
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