Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 55
  2. Injustice
     … Practicing the Dhamma doesn’t mean becoming a doormat, or becoming totally oblivious to the problems of the world. Practicing the Dhamma means trying to develop a skillful attitude toward them. Meanwhile, your emotional feeding habits have to be taken away from the world and focused more on skillful qualities of the mind inside. When you’re feeding well inside, then your actions outside … 
  3. Strength for the Heat
    It’s that time of year when the heat becomes a concern, becomes an obsession. The question is how to meditate in the heat. A lot of the answer is common sense. Make sure you get plenty of water and some electrolytes, or at least some salt. Look for a cool spot in the monastery. Some spots are cooler than others. Find a nice … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. Joy in the Effort
     … That then becomes your karma. So it’s for your sake that you have goodwill for others, and it’s for your sake that you have goodwill for yourself. You can start exploring where there may be some ill will in your mind. Remind yourself that you don’t have to like other people in order to have goodwill for them. And you’re … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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.
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. The Buddha’s Lists
     … But when you know that there are four noble truths, not just one, or not just three, and that desire can play a role as part of the path—the things you’re doing to get to the end of suffering—then you become more discerning. That lamp that clears the darkness gets brighter, and you see subtler things inside that you wouldn’t … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. Protecting Yourself Against Yourself
     … This becomes an important refuge on the path. This is when you’re beginning to provide yourself with a good refuge. So it’s the concentration together with the factors of discernment that provide you with your protection. They show you the reasons for why we’re doing this, and they develop the qualities of the mind that will keep you circumspect. It’s … 
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