Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Gifts of Goodness… Your mind becomes more expansive and you have a sense of wealth, in that you have more than enough to share. The mind feels wealthy, knowing that whatever you’ve given up, you can work to replace it and then share more of that as well. So as you gain, the people benefit from your generosity gain as well. The same with virtue: When …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- You Should Heed These Shoulds… Because no matter what you become, it’s all subject to being inconstant, stressful, not-self. Instead, you should simply reflect: If you have some discontent about your lodging, don’t feel bad about yourself. Just notice, ‘Discontent is like this.’” I’ve never seen the Buddha give advice like that. What this line of thought is doing is taking the three perceptions and …
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