Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 55
  2. Happiness Without Conflict
     … the desires that the Buddha said lead to becoming, taking on an identity in a particular world of experience. To what extent are you still doing that? Because as long as that kind of desire is still going, it’s got to feed. It’s got to cling. How can you learn how to let go of these things? The best way, as the … 
  3. A Confident Ego
     … And if you develop that skill, it becomes an important tool in your arsenal when you’re dealing with obstreperous emotions—the ones that constantly want to be fed, that want their pleasures right now. They don’t care about the future. No matter how much your anticipation or heedfulness is telling you that you’ve got to prepare for the future, there’s … 
  4. To Purify the Heart
     … In that way, you become your own teacher, you become your own explorer of the Dhamma. As you do this, you develop sensitivity to what you’re doing. You develop sensitivity to the results of what you’re doing. And, as the Buddha said, you use your actions in this way as a mirror to watch your mind. That’s how you purify the … 
  5. Right Now
     … Your life becomes a mess. So when we develop conviction in the principle of karma, we take responsibility for our actions. We look carefully at what we’re doing and at what the results are. That’s why it’s such a good teaching to adopt. One of the very first lessons the Buddha gave to his son after his son was ordained as … 
  6. Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness
     … In that way, the activities become not a chore to be disposed of as quickly as possible, or something just getting in the way of your meditation. They become part of the meditation. After all the word for meditation is bhavana: It means “to develop.” You’re developing qualities of mind. And the mind that cleans your room is the same mind that tries … 
  7. The Breathing Game
     … You become a better judge of what intentions to act on because you’ve seen what intentions have worked in the past to actually create a sense of well-being, to create the results that you, really deep down inside, would like to see. This, in basic terms, is the skill you’re working on: the skill not to get sucked in to the … 
  8. The Dhamma Protects
     … Sometimes they’re strong feelings of energy—which feel good for a while if you’re feeling tired, weak, rundown; the strong energy is a good way of charging your batteries—but after a while they become excessive and unpleasant. That’s when you patiently have to look: “Okay, where’s the subtler energy in here?” Tune-in to a different level of energy … 
  9. Mind Control
     … He’s not the sort of teacher who says, “Just be mindful,” or, “Just be fully present, and everything else will take care of itself.” You’ve got to look for where the suffering is, where there’s a cause of suffering, what events in the mind actually have the potential to become the path to the end of suffering. These are things you … 
  10. A True Man of No Rank
     … Toward the end of his life, he was in position to become abbot there at the monastery. And a monk from another monastery decided, no, that Luang Lung was not an appropriate candidate because he was too plain spoken. So, the other monk made himself acting abbot. When he later came to Luang Lung’s funeral, he was taken aback by how many people … 
  11. The Skill of Stillness
     … When we’ve tried to pull ourselves out of them, sometimes we’ve done it in a very unskillful way, which then becomes more proof that we should honor our moods. Actually, it’s simply a sign that we have to learn some new skills. Now, because moods take over the body, one of the first things you’ve got to do is reclaim … 
  12. From Anxiety to Confidence
     … As the Buddha also said, we need mixed karma in order to become humans. If you want to find a place where people have nothing but good karma, you have to go way up into the higher heavens. So we’re living in a mixed bag, but we try to develop our perfections in an imperfect world. We can’t let other people’s … 
  13. Heightened Skillfulness
     … That then becomes your karma. So you don’t think about whether someone does or doesn’t deserve your goodwill. You’re generous with your goodwill to all. In fact, there are ways in which you can see that all three of these forms of making merit—doing what’s skillful, virtue, and the development of goodwill—are forms of generosity. With virtue, you … 
  14. Elemental Normalcy
     … I want to think about this desire, and I want to be thinking about who I am, or where I’m going, and what world I’m going to live in.” It’s what they call becoming, which we’re doing all the time. You have to ask yourself why you go for these things. This is where you bring in the teachings on … 
  15. Mental Movements
     … You’re so used to doing it that it becomes sort of the background. Once something gets hidden in the background like that, it’s really hard to see. You’ve got to pull it out to see: What are the attitudes that cause you to carry these things around? What do you get out of it? At the same time, what suffering do … 
  16. The Right Time at the Right Place
     … Try to maintain it as long as it’s comfortable, and, if it becomes uncomfortable, you can change. The needs of the body with regard to the breath will change as the mind begins to settle down, so you have to keep making adjustments. You can think of that comfortable breath energy spreading through different parts of the body: from the back of the … 
  17. Clinging to Karmic Diarrhea
     … When you become sensitive to these things and can learn how to pass judgment wisely, that’s when your discernment really grows and really is of use—really makes a difference. Because the whole purpose of this practice is to learn how to stop doing the things that cause us suffering. You have to watch and see: “What am I doing? What are the … 
  18. Taking the Buddha at his Word
     … If the thinking and the acting stick close together, then even when you think an awful lot, it doesn’t become too much. As Ajaan Fuang once noted, Ajaan Lee was a very curious person, very inquisitive. He once commented that if Ajaan Lee had met me, he probably would have spent a lot of time picking my brain, asking questions, learning what’s … 
  19. Determination
     … What kind of person will you become? What activities do you have to master to get what you want? You can go through all kinds of different possible goals and ask yourself, “Is it going to be worth it?” You also have to think about the amount of time involved. Do you have time for all of the things you want? If something is … 
  20. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … It becomes a cause for suffering. So remember that equanimity is the alternative to goodwill. Not that it replaces it. It just puts things into perspective. It’s where you back off and look at what really needs to be done, what has to be sacrificed for the sake of what other things. Because all too often we’re presented with situations where there … 
  21. Concentration as Wilderness
     … When I was in the hospital with malaria in Thailand, I found that breathing was becoming more and more laborious, because, after all, the parasites were eating up my red blood cells. Very little oxygen was getting to the muscles that were doing the breathing. I realized that if I changed my mental picture of where the breath was coming in and how it … 
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