Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 60
  2. The Right to Repair Your Mind
     … craving for becoming, craving for sensuality, craving for no becoming. Notice, this doesn’t cover every form of desire. There are other desires that are actually part of the path to the end of suffering. But these three are the ones that actually lead to the clinging that’s going to be the suffering. And again, we very rarely look at craving as a … 
  3. Guilt & Shame
     … Shame cultures can tend to give rise to people who, if they become mentally unstable, go into psychosis. Guilt culture’s mentally unstable people tend to go into neurosis. But everybody internalizes something of both. In some cases, it has to do with how your parents raised you. In other cases, it has to do with your karmic background as you come into this … 
  4. Streams of Anger
     … Sometimes we feel that other people’s misbehavior gives us extraordinary rights to misbehave, but then it becomes our karma. So, these are things you keep in mind to restrain yourself, but the actual solution is not in the mindfulness, it’s going to be in the discernment. One of the reasons we practice concentration is to get to know how the mind fabricates … 
  5. Learning How to Learn
     … This is where the skill of learning how to learn becomes important. This is one of the reasons why the ajaans take so seriously the various skills around the monastery—how to keep the monastery clean, how to chant, how to take care of your robes, how to provide the requisites. You want to learn how to do all of these activities well, and … 
  6. Bigger than the World
     … You want to establish this as your default mode, as your context, so that you can see these processes of becoming as they happen. You can see how the mind gets into them and takes them on, like putting on a suit of clothes. But you also realize that you don’t have to. There’s a skill in not taking these things on … 
  7. Breath Meditation, Step by Step
     … Stay with the body and mind, with the breath long enough that the lines become perfectly clear—so there’s no guesswork involved. Now, to stay with the breath, you have to make it comfortable. You can experiment with different rhythms of breathing: You can breathe in long and out long. Think of yourself as ventilating both the body and the mind. And then … 
  8. Commit Yourself
     … Find a spot that you like and hang out there for a while, letting it become comfortable. Then see if you can make other spots in the body as comfortable as your first special favorite spot. This way, you develop your mindfulness at the same time you’re helping to prevent the mind from wandering off. That’s how you can give some continuity … 
  9. The Teacher Inside
     … This way, the pattern of the meditation becomes ingrained so that you don’t get careless and complacent. All too often you say, “Well, I know the basics already. I’d like to move on to the higher things.” But the higher things depend on the basics. You can’t have the 53rd story of a building unless you have the first story, the … 
  10. Doubts
     … But are they good hypotheses? You can test them by what’s called a pragmatic proof: “If I were to assume rebirth, and assume the importance of karma, and assume the importance of my mental actions in particular, what kind of person would I become? What kind of actions would I engage in?” And you realize that these hypotheses inspire in skillful actions. So … 
  11. Basic Wisdom
     … He recommends that you be generous, that you observe the precepts, and you develop good qualities in the mind through mindfulness and meditation, partly because these actions give rise to good results, and partly because he wants you to become sensitive to what you’re doing— because this is the big issue in life. We’re constantly doing, doing, doing things, and some place … 
  12. Views, Virtue, & Mindfulness
     … The tendency to forget also becomes a habit, which makes it harder to develop mindfulness when you’re going to sit down and meditate. Your mind ranges back into the past, and all you can see are unskillful things, so you start putting up walls of forgetfulness. That becomes a habit, a habit that’s hard to get out of. So that’s still … 
  13. Over & Over Again
     … So figure out ways to enjoy the process, so that it doesn’t become tedious, so that it stays fresh. Then do it again and again and again. Someday as you’re walking down the path, you’ll stumble over something valuable. It’s there. It’s simply a matter of being meticulous and ardent and sensitive to what’s going on. Some people … 
  14. Thinking Your Way to Stillness
     … You think about the qualities that lead people to become devas and reflect that you have those qualities in yourself: a sense of shame over the idea of doing something evil, a sense of compunction that you wouldn’t want to engage in evil. Virtue, generosity, conviction, wisdom: These are all qualities that lead people to become devas, and you’ve got them, to … 
  15. The Middle Way
     … After a while, it becomes more and more natural that this is the place where you want to stay and keep looking. An important way of establishing this frame of reference is trying to make the breath as comfortable as possible. Once it’s comfortable, you can start thinking of that sense of ease spreading throughout the body: down the front, down the back … 
  16. The Graduated Discourse
     … But before there’s death, it’s interesting to note that everybody who seems to have an enviable position in life becomes the target of a lot of jealousy. As you get older and weaker, it’s not that people let up and treat you more gently and with more respect. They actually just get worse, because they see that you’re weak and … 
  17. Equanimity Isn’t Nibbana
     … Second is the craving to become something—in other words, to take on an identity in a specific world of experience. The identity often plays into the world, the world plays into the identity. Whatever identity you build around a desire will then determine the parts of the world you pay attention to, in terms of whether they help or hinder you from attaining … 
  18. Precarious Knowledge
     … However you know things, he says, the means by which you know them are becoming otherwise while you watch. Everything is changing very fast. So if your knowledge and ideas are dependent on changeable things, your knowledge and ideas are going to be changeable, too. So when you learn something that really is useful, that does have a good impact on the mind, put … 
  19. The Middleness of the Path
     … This is why our path is a gradual one, a step-by-step path, as we become more and more sensitive to what we’re doing, more sensitive to the results, so that gradually we become more and more sensitive to what’s actually right here. And it’s in working with this issue — the middleness of the path, what’s appropriate right now … 
  20. Looking in Three Directions
     … If you keep these three things in mind—what your plan is for the meditation, what you’re actually doing, how well you’re doing it and how well the results are going—this is how the meditation becomes a skill. You learn to recognize problems as they come up and you use your ingenuity to figure them out. You see if you can … 
  21. Healing Breath
     … And you try to become sensitive to variations in the breath, noticing when the breath longer, when it’s shorter, when it’s deeper, or when it’s more shallow, when it’s heavier or lighter. Notice the effect that these different ways of breathing have on the body. Find one spot where it’s easy to stay focused on the sensation of breathing … 
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