Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 66
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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