Search results for: "Becoming"
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- The Discernment of a True Person… Where is it really beautiful? And where is it not? And what things come along with it? This way, as the body gets less and less prominent, the issue of the lust in and of itself becomes more prominent. That’s when you can deal with it directly: Why do you want the perceptions that give rise to lust? So whatever your problem is …
- Changing Your Mind… It’s not tensed up, ready to jump, and that way, the sense of stillness in your mind does become your home. And you become a homebody—somebody who really likes to stay here. That’s when the concentration makes a change in the mind. It reaches a point where it’s no longer just a technique or a game you play. It’s …
- Generosity & Virtue as Skills… You do want the focus of your concentration to be strong and steady, but you don’t want it to be so heavy that it becomes constricting. Ehis is a matter of watching yourself, learning how to step back from what you’re doing and judge it with a certain amount of equanimity and patience. There was a famous teacher in Thailand who had …
- The Culture of the Practice… They’re expecting a greater nobility out of you, which is why this is such a good culture for the purpose of becoming responsible. Respect and nobility are all part of becoming a respectable person yourself, a noble person yourself—because that’s what’s required in this path. The culture is all part of it. The system of values is all part of …
- Right Effort… As you begin to sense that you’re becoming a better and better cook, you want to go back into the kitchen and work at it some more. As you begin to master a foreign language, you find that you enjoy learning new words, figuring out the idioms, trying to test your skills, so that you can get better and better at it. You …
- Slowing Down to Look… But keep an eye on it, because there comes a point where grieving become self-indulgent and detrimental. This is what mindfulness is for: to step back from our emotions to parse them. Part of us resists that. We want to have pure emotion, intense emotion, without any sort of commentary. But we have to remember that our actions are part of a causal …
- Warrior Knowledge… That’s when you become an artist. That’s when the art becomes your own. And the same principle applies in the practice. Curiosity and ingenuity make all the difference — when you learn to question your old patterns and test new possibilities. This is why it’s so important to be able to come out to a quiet, secluded place like this where you …
- Head, Heart, & Gut… craving for sensuality, for becoming, and for not becoming. A lot of people jump from that statement to a much bigger generalization: that all desire is bad, which is not the case. The path to the end of suffering also includes desire. It’s part of right effort. Our problem is that our desires tend to go in conflicting directions. One minute, you may …
- Choose Your Cravings Wisely… There’s no center of desire around which a becoming would form. But in the meantime, you’ve got to use this process. You’re going to take on the becoming of concentration. That requires a desire. So choose your desires well, choose your cravings well, so that they lead you in the direction you want to go. Then, as you settle in, you …
- No One Size Fits All… It gives the mind something cool, clean, and refreshing to focus on when contemplation of the body becomes oppressive. So it’s a good technique to have in your background, and there are many ways of dealing with it, many things you can do with the breath: focusing on the impact of the breath on the body, learning how to allow that impact to …
- An Examined Life… So it becomes a habit, not only multitasking outside, but multitasking inside as well. There’s a whole committee in there. Everybody’s jabbering away for fear that there will be a moment of silence. That’s one way of thinking about death. The other way is to realize that there are things you can do to prepare. In other words, there are skillful …
- Broaden Your Range of Choices… Sometimes it’s just neutral energy, neither good nor bad, but if you tie it up with your anger, it suddenly becomes something really destructive. You want to learn how to cut those ties, so that the energy is one thing and the anger is something else. You can step back both from the energy and the anger, and ask yourself: What bad habits …
- Your World to Practice In… This becomes the point where you focus most of your energy: trying to understand where you’re clinging, where you’re craving, how you can learn to stop. That’s going to be delicate work, which is why the meditation is necessary, why seclusion is necessary: so that you can see your own mind, know your own mind, in action. As you get to …
- Putting Aside the World… They all work together, so that goodwill doesn’t become sentimental and clingy, and equanimity doesn’t become cold-hearted. Right now, try to develop equanimity for all the things that would pull you away from the breath. No matter how serious the responsibilities may be, they pale by comparison with your responsibility for looking after your own mind. This is something nobody else …
- Mindfulness Immersed in the Breath… That, in turn, becomes a cause for higher levels of happiness. Deeper, more lasting. So this is the context of the meditation: goodwill for all—with the understanding that this happiness that we’re wishing for ourselves and others has to come from causes. Then we get to work. Focus on your breath coming in, going out. It’s from focusing on the breath …
- Practicing Your Scales… The craving for this kind of identity is called craving for becoming. So just in this process of the mind creating thought worlds, you see a lot about ignorance and craving, and all the other factors of dependent co- arising. You watch them in action. It’s all happening right here. But instead of having to memorize the lists of dependent co-arising, the …
- Beneficial Thinking… It becomes the time when the mind really feels that it’s snugly in its home, in a place where it really does belong. So don’t think of thinking as an obstacle. Learn how to use it as a factor in your meditation. When you’re thinking about issues surrounding the breath and about the way the breath relates to the mind, the …
- Trust in the Power of the Mind… We’ve become sensitive to certain things that are useful for society. As society gets more and more capitalist, the education gets more and more capitalist, too. Things like the humanities and religion fall to the wayside. The subjects that are actually good for your mind fall to the wayside. You get sensitized to the things that are useful for making a living, but …
- The Power of Present Kamma… These three kinds of fabrication actually become part of the path. And they’re the skills you need to master so that when bad things come in from the past, you don’t have to suffer from them. The first fabrication is bodily: your breath, the breath coming in and out right now. After all, it’s through the breath that you experience the …
- Insight Is a Judgment Call… It becomes your kamma now. It becomes a habit, a quality of the mind. The same with virtue, when you really put virtue into practice by following the precepts: Try to make it an absolute promise to yourself that you’re going to stick to these precepts. You catch yourself about to do things that you used to do and you used to think …
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