Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Protect Your Inner Center… It becomes more and more your center of gravity. Then when events happen, you notice the event but you see it as just going right past you. It’s not that you become cold-hearted or don’t care about things. It’s simply that you learn not to take things personally, not to grab hold of things and pull them in, pull them …
- Truth as Medicine… This is where you learn to become your own doctor. But that basic attitude as a doctor: You look at the various truths, the things you know that you really believe in, and say, “Okay, this is a kind of medicine but is this a good medicine for me right now?” It’s like doctors in the old days. They’d go into the …
- Own Your Actions… But as long as you’re very actively questioning, you become a moving target, and the pain can’t shoot you. After a while you begin to realize that the pain’s not trying to shoot you. It’s because you’ve been running up after it and gobbling it down. But if you stop gobbling it and instead approach it from other angles …
- Unraveling the Present… If you go back behind stage, you begin to get some idea of this, and after a while it becomes not so funny after all. It’s the same with all the elaborate things we create in our mind. They entertain us, they impress us, whatever, but if you just look at the process of mental creation, you begin to realize how stressful it …
- Goodness Comes from Heedfulness… You’re going to open them up, release the blockage, and the body becomes a much more comfortable place to be. Then you take that same principle and apply it to other people, other beings. Learn how to perceive them as your companions in birth, aging, illness, and death. They’re suffering, too, so why would you want to add to their suffering? What …
- Merit: Actively Happy… Eventually the prince becomes a servant to the king, and then a trusted servant. Finally, there comes a day when he’s in a position where he could kill the king. But he doesn’t. What holds him back is the memory of his father who, before he died, said to him, “Don’t look too far, don’t look too close. Because animosity …
- Three Virtues for the Mind… We take the potentials coming from the past and we select from among them and nurture certain potentials until they become actualized, while we allow others to stay unactualized at least for the time being. Which means that when we’re suffering right now, we don’t have to continue to suffer. We can change the way we’re relating to a particular sensation …
- Attachment to Precepts… In other words, they don’t become part of your pride and identity in the sense that, “I’m proud because I can hold to this precept, but other people around here can’t.” That kind of comparison is where the precept becomes a problem. But the precept itself is not the problem; it’s your attitude toward the precept, or the attitude toward …
- Faith in Present Intentions… This is one of those truths that *becomes *true because you believe in it and act on that belief. There was an American philosopher, William James, who said that there are basically two kinds of truths. There are truths of the observer, say, where you’re trying to watch the movement of the planets: Wanting them to be a certain way actually gets in …
- Directed Thoughts, Random Thoughts… But when the mind is focused on one thing, directing its thoughts to an object, then its other thoughts, its random thoughts, become clear. So try to stay anchored in this one object. Get to know it really well. The breath has lots of ins and outs. If you have parts of the body that tend to have chronic pain, see if you can …
- Possessed by Emotions… Learn how to use them skillfully, so that you, too, can become professional in driving out the defilements that have possessed you. Make sure that this is your territory, where nobody else can come in. In that way, this weak point, which has been so easily taken over in the past, becomes your strong point: Nobody else can use you, nobody else can move …
- Fear of Death… You’ve learned to pry yourself loose from sensual cravings that pull you by a string Then if you develop discernment, you can get past even craving for becoming and craving for non-becoming. Otherwise, there’s a passage we chant often which says we’re a slave to craving. Think about that passage in the Canon. Ratthapala is talking to King Korayva and …
- Fear of Letting Go… Some people say, “I just can’t imagine myself having all those qualities.” But if you work on them, you become a different person. It may take a while. Sometimes the steps are baby steps. But if they’re steps in the right direction, you find, after a while, that the things you couldn’t do in the past—you couldn’t even imagine …
- Look After Yourself with Ease… As you do this, you become a good example to others, too. They can see that it really is possible to work on yourself and make some important changes, make some radical changes, inside. There’re some teachings where you’re stuck with a particular self and your particular self is defiled and so you can’t help yourself, you’ve got to have …
- Delighting the Mind… The mind is basically getting into a state of becoming. Any kind of thinking that promotes more states of becoming counts as objectification. But you can learn to work in the direction of non-objectification by simply seeing things as events, without building a “me” or a world around them. Just simply: These events are happening; this event causes that event, this action causes …
- Respect… They become the context themselves. Then you’re ardent, alert, and mindful. This is where the quality of respect comes in. You’re ardent in trying to do this well, trying to do it skillfully. If anything unskillful comes up in the mind, you want to abandon it. If you notice any skillful qualities, you try to develop them. You don’t just simply …
- The Buddha’s Conventions… When you come to the Dhamma, the question becomes not how to get rid of your social conditioning, but: What purposes do you want to serve with your conditioning? In what ways do you need to be re-conditioned to serve those purposes? Because our idea of a perception that’s true basically comes down to: Does it work well enough? For a lot …
- Three More Recollections… As Ajaan Lee once said, when you’re generous, the whole world becomes your home. The people you’ve shared things with become your relatives. This is one of the reasons why, in Thailand, when monks speak of the supporters of the monastery they use the term yaat yom, which literally means our relatives. When you give a gift it breaks down barriers. One …
- Generating Energy… refreshment, a sense of well-being that then becomes food for the concentration. This is when the kite finally catches the wind. You’re focused on the breath in the way that gives rise to a sense of fullness, and then you feed off of that, so that you can stay with it more consistently, with a greater sense of solidity, stability. So remember …
- Choiceful Awareness… That’s how you become sensitive to them. If the mind seems to be totally placid, accepting everything that comes along, give it this choice to stay with the breath and see how accepting it is. If it’s not accepting of this choice, you’ve got a problem. When you recognize that the problem is something you need to solve, you can begin …
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