Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. Endurance Made Easier
     … These are the strategies for helping your endurance become less of a burden and turn into something stable, lasting, and strong.
  3. The Riddle Tree
     … In cases like that you may find that the perception becomes the issue on which you have to focus in order to gain insight. This is particularly true as you’re shifting from form levels of concentration to the formless. It’s a shift in perception. You’re right here when you go from, say focusing on the breath to the point where the … 
  4. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … The Buddha talks about this as an asava, an “outflow.” We flow out to our senses through our sensual plans, our desire for becoming, and just out of plain ignorance—and because of that ignorance we’re bewildered. Think about when you were a little kid, really small, and you were dealing with pain. Pain is why we think—why we try to figure … 
  5. Even Shame Can Be Skillful
     … And they do become a helpful part of the path. As the Buddha said, when you see you’ve made a mistake, letting yourself get eaten up by remorse is not going to erase the past mistake. But a healthy sense of shame—“That was a mistake, I don’t want to repeat that”—becomes the basis for your resolve not to do that … 
  6. Friends with Pain
     … This way, pain becomes your friend. It teaches you a lot of things about the role of intention in the present moment. It’s a demanding task master. If you the least bit unskillful, it hits you with a stick. What that means is that you just have to get more and more mindful, more and more alert, more and more discerning, so that … 
  7. Three Perceptions
     … When the breath gets more and more refined, with a sense of ease filling the body, you reach a stage where the mind and the breath seem to become unified and one. The mind and its functions become more and more prominent in the meditation, and the breath — as it grows more and more subtle — fades into the background. This is just as it … 
  8. Outside the Box
     … If they’re willing to put up with that and give them pointers on how to do things properly, eventually the kids become really helpful, and they enjoy being helpful. And that’s wise. It’s wise to encourage this attitude, and it’s wise for them. So this is what merit is all about: finding joy in being helpful as a way of … 
  9. Recollecting the Devas
     … Just because people have become spirits doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about. And just because you can’t figure out where these beings are coming from doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily evil. So you’re polite with them, but you don’t have to fear them or worship them. Ajaan Mun offered a good example in this regard … 
  10. The Patience of a Hunter
     … It’s still enough so that areas of the mind that normally get sloughed past or become a blur because you’re running around too much, suddenly become clear. It’s like the difference between running past a tree and standing still, watching the tree. You see very different trees. If you run past, you see a blur. You may get a few details … 
  11. The Possibility of Letting Go
     … In fact, the less you’re feeding off a relationship, the better the relationship becomes—and the more you’re able to see it with clarity. So wherever you find that there’s something that’s a really bad sticking point in the mind, just let it go—at least for the time being. Think about putting it down. Think about putting it down … 
  12. Unentangled Compassion
     … But they all develop right here, out of these very basic qualities of being alert, mindful, ardent as you stay with the breath so that more and more your sense of happiness, your sense of well-being inside, does become independent of other people. This is why the Buddha talks about non-entanglement as an important principle in the practice. The more entangled you … 
  13. Right View: Feeding Instructions
     … When you start practicing, though, you take those bricks, put them down on the ground, arrange them, and they become a path that you can follow. Your relationship to them becomes different. You’re still feeding, but you’re feeding in a different way. You’re feeding more skillfully. And this feeding off the right concentration is what gives you the strength to go … 
  14. Encouragement
     … The amount of time required to become a chess master doesn’t really pay off. If you’re too good at chess, it shows that you don’t know how to manage your time. So devote enough time to it so that you can make a respectable showing, but nothing more. There are more important things in life. Yet when it comes to the … 
  15. Taking Risks
     … To get beyond the processes of becoming you have to learn how to do the processes of becoming very skillfully. There’s a paradoxical aspect to the path he found. Which is one of the reasons why, after finding the end of suffering, he despaired of teaching that path to anybody else. But then he was convinced that there would be at least some … 
  16. The Wisdom of Equanimity
     … The Buddha then remarks to the monks, “If the king hadn’t killed his father, he would have become a stream enterer right there. But because he killed his father, he cut himself off at the root.” The sutta then ends, saying, “And the monks delighted in the Buddha’s words.” Now it seems kind of evil, their delighting in the fact that this … 
  17. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … When the breath does get comfortable, how do you allow that comfort to spread? If you push it around too much, it becomes uncomfortable. How do you allow it? These are some of the questions you can ask yourself as you do things. In this case, the questions are not idle or speculative questions. They’re practical questions. You’re trying to master a … 
  18. The Power of Present Karma
     … That becomes the potential for right resolve; right resolve becomes the potential for right speech; and so on down the line. Which may be one of the reasons why, when the Buddha was talking about the power of the mind at death, he focused on right view. As long as you hold on to that, you’re safe, because that will alert you to … 
  19. Appreciation
     … There’s a passage that appears several places in the Canon, where the Buddha points out that one of the valid motivations for wanting to become an arahant is that the gifts that are given to you will then bear great rewards for the people who gave them. In other words, becoming an arahant is not a selfish thing. You realize that a lot … 
  20. The Luminous Mind
     … In other words, if you don’t will it, it won’t become true for you. So this is what we’re working on right now, trying to give the desire for what’s skillful more power over the mind, so that there can be more moments of clarity, so that we can begin to weaken the causes of ignorance. And ignorance here is … 
  21. Cut the Currents
     … Another current the Buddha talks about, another effluent, is the effluent of becoming. This is when you want to take on an identity in a certain world of experience—you want to be something so you can get something in that world. Again, this is going to be very strong at the moment of death. You feel that everything you’ve identified with is … 
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