Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 65
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. Signs Along the Road
     … That’s where you’re going to see your cravings, that’s where you’re going to see your clingings, that’s where you’re going to see the processes of becoming as they begin to form. A little knot of tension develops, and then you slap a perception on to it as being a thought. Then there’s the question, “A thought of … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. Breath vs. Distraction
     … If you’re sitting here with nothing to do and nothing to think about and no questions about what’s going on right now, then you start asking questions like, “Well, what about last week? And what about next week? And what about what I’m going to do when I leave here?” And all of a sudden those questions become a lot more … 
  7. Practice in Dying Skillfully
     … You’re aware of the breath—in the beginning stages of the concentration, trying to become one with the breath. But then after you become one with the breath, there’s a natural separation. It’s like two different kinds of liquid, such as oil and vinegar, in the same bottle. As the bottle sits still for a while, they begin to separate out … 
  8. Skills to Make a Difference
     … craving for sensuality, for becoming, for non-becoming. These forms craving are to be abandoned. Then there’s fact that that craving can be ended, and that when you end the craving, that’s the end of suffering. That’s something you want to realize, to actually see it happening. And you do that by developing the path, which basically comes down to virtue … 
  9. You Can Make a Difference
     … Two, for becoming, in other words, focusing on a desire and then developing a sense of you as the person who wants that, and you as the person who may be able to attain that, and then the world in which that desired object can be found—and then you enter into that world. We do this with our thoughts all the time, and … 
  10. Dependable Friends
     … This way, you become friends with the breath. As the Buddha said, there’s no real practicing the path without true friends. Now, that can be understood on two levels. On the outside level, that means you find someone who really knows something about the practice. On the inside level, it means learning to be able to recognize who are your internal friends, and … 
  11. Self-Reliance
     … This is a faculty you want to develop, because without this, meditation simply becomes something that someone else tells you to do and you follow the instructions like a good little boy or a good little girl, hoping that somehow it’ll all work out on its own, and that the people who are teaching know what they’re talking about. But that’s … 
  12. Into the Light of Consciousness
     … And the better you get to know them right here, the less they become subconscious. You’re bringing them into the light of consciousness where you can see them and pass judgment on them well. That’s another important part about fabrications: They offer us choices, and we need to have good principles in choosing what to do, what to say, what to think … 
  13. To Keep You Going
     … After they had become arahants, the Buddha gave a sermon called the Ovada Patimokkha. We don’t have a record of the full sermon. All we have is a record of the verses that the Buddha used to summarize the main points, but the verses are enough to let us know that he started his sermon with the theme of patient endurance. The message … 
  14. Karma & Gratitude
     … In other words, your happiness spreads around, and in so doing, it becomes goodness. And meditation is one of those activities where the happiness, the goodness, spreads around. You see this most clearly if you’ve been meditating and the mind was filled with anger before you sat down to meditate but by the time you’re done, the anger has subsided. That means … 
  15. The Path of Adventure
     … So if you develop a mature attitude toward being on the path, everything else becomes a lot easier, because you’re not measuring things against your own impatient standards, you’re not wanting to do all 10,000 steps at once so that you can have it over and done with and move on to something else. As the Buddha said, the path is … 
  16. The Airplane Mechanic
     … If it’s a soldier’s uniform, you suddenly become a soldier. If it’s an apron, you have to become a cook—whatever. But here, you just put it aside and say, “Okay, there’s a piece of clothing on the floor, but I don’t have to go there. I don’t have to get into it.” If you’re going to … 
  17. In the Eyes of the Wise
     … Because, after all, those are the people whose club you want to join—you want to become a wise person, too. It’s like Ajaan Mun, when he was accused of not following Thai customs: eating only one meal a day, living in the forest, wearing robes that were made up of scraps. People would say, “You’re not behaving in line with Thai … 
  18. Part V : Finding a Teacher
     … He or she helps clear up your misunderstandings on those topics, but the friendship becomes admirable when you find yourself growing in those qualities yourself. After all, the purpose of an admirable friend is to help you recognize who your admirable friends are inside. One of our main problems is that we suffer from delusion. Thoughts come into the mind and it’s hard … 
  19. Harmless & Clearheaded
     … So the pride he felt around his youth, his health, and his life was not really becoming, and it was setting him up for a major fall. So that was one problem with all the sensual pleasures he was enjoying. They had him intoxicated. He was drunk, couldn’t see things clearly. He had to get away from those pleasures if he wanted to … 
  20. Start with Goodwill
     … Or if they’ve had a lapse — in other words, they’re experiencing the happiness that comes from their past actions, but their present actions are not all that skillful — empathetic joy means, May they resume becoming skillful. They’ve been skillful in the past, but as we all know, some people get the rewards of their goodness and then they turn bad. It … 
  21. Coming into the Present
     … Birth follows immediately on becoming and so on down through dependent co-arising. That’s a synchronic level of causality. It’s because the Buddha discovered synchronic causality that he realized that we’re not a victim of past fate, our old karma, orsome primary cause or ground of bein, or first mover. There are decisions that are being made freely in the present … 
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