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