Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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