Search results for: "Becoming"
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- A Healthy Attitude Toward Happiness… You become a slave to those things. But if your happiness is independent, that gives you freedom. So it starts with little things like this, just learning how to breathe in a way that feels really good. This is going to require continued attention. The three qualities the Buddha recommends for this are mindfulness, alertness, and ardency. Mindfulness means keeping things in mind—in …
- Insight Is Seeing What’s Worth Doing… As you act in more skillful ways, life becomes a lot lighter. You feel a lot better about yourself. There are a lot of people out there who, when they’re feeling bad about themselves, go see a therapist. And what the therapist should tell them is, “Go out and do something good. Go out and help somebody. Try to be more principled in …
- Preparing to Die Well… Even though eventually we try to let go of all states of becoming, we do that first by developing a skillful state of becoming—right concentration of the mind—which gives a standpoint from which we can gain practice in letting go of grosser pleasures, grosser attachments. The main attachments you let go when you’re developing concentration are the hindrances, beginning with sensual …
- Empathetic Joy Is Ennobling… That way, the practice becomes ennobling. And in ennobling you, it makes your mind much broader and in a better position to settle down and say, “Each of us has our own happiness. There’s no reason to be jealous, no reason to be envious. But I’ve got my work to do.” The potentials for happiness are here inside. Just make sure you …
- Relationships… It becomes more and more an inward issue. And when you’re not leaning on your relationships, you’re not leaning on things outside, you’re putting less weight on them as well. The Buddha talks a lot about clinging. And when we hear those teachings, we immediately translate them into attachment. We start thinking about our attachments to other people, our attachments to …
- Faith in Goodness… There are times when it may be difficult to give, but by overcoming the difficulty, we become stronger, and we have more respect for ourselves. So when you engage in the meditation, it’s meritorious. It’s good. The Buddha focuses on the brahmaviharas, and particularly the brahmavihara of goodwill. But goodwill includes compassion and empathetic joy. You see people who are suffering, or …
- Mastery… When you’re working on concentration, you’re creating a state of becoming so that you can put the mind in a position where it can finally go beyond becoming. So it’s important that we realize the role of paradox in what we’re doing. Sometimes we have to develop skills that eventually we have to transcend, but you can’t get past …
- Consciousness, Awakened & Not… If you look carefully at the formula, you realize that he teaches the path of actions, training your actions through the precepts, training the actions of your mind through concentration and through discernment, so that you can become sensitive to what’s getting in the way of the unconditioned and you can clear it away. That’s his strategy Which is why people who …
- Maybe the Buddha Knew Something… So the government came up with the idea of having the monks become teachers. They had no teacher training colleges at that point. Monasteries were encouraged to give land to build schools, and to this day most of the schools you see in Thailand are built on monastery land. Monks were encouraged to—and ultimately told they had to—become teachers in the schools …
- The Balance of Power… Then the parts of the mind that want some immediate gratification, they’ll become your friends too, they’ll like it. Then you work on allowing that sense of ease to spread to different parts the body. And this is something each of us has to find our own way of doing. In some cases you maintain your center on that original spot and …
- The Pursuit of True Happiness… You can breathe in ways that minimize suffering or actually become actively refreshing, satisfying, absorbing. You find with this simple act of staying with the breath—as you stay with it longer and longer, trying to keep yourself as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels, making a little adjustment here, a little adjustment there—that a sense of ease comes without your …
- Forgiveness… If the plan for all of this is that we’re going to become one loving community, we need to get back on good terms with everybody else. Especially if we’re going to be divided into two communities for eternity—those who are on loving terms and those who are not on loving terms—everyone would want to be on the loving-terms …
- Oppressed by Old Kamma… But when you become a meditator, you have to realize that these are things you have to free yourself from. You do that by learning to look at thoughts as processes. That’s one way of getting out of their power. So you need the tricks to learn how to deal with them in the same way that people learn the tricks that advertisers …
- Loss… So reflection on loss, when it’s done properly, becomes a motivation to the practice. Because you look at the alternative: just more loss, and you come back again for more loss again. Like King Koravya: You come back and you have to fight for whatever you’re going to get, and then it goes away. You have to ask yourself, “Is that what …
- A Good Buddhist Ego… You get the mind into concentration and you don’t think about the fact that you’re doing the concentration, it’s just a process that you’ve mastered so smoothly by that point it becomes almost automatic. Your sense of self is not called into question. There’s nothing to obstruct what you want to do. It’s when you meet up with …
- The Dhamma Eye… In fact, if seeing that there is no self were part of stream-entry, then why did the Buddha have to give the not-self-discourse to the five brethren after they had all become stream-enterers? The answer comes from a passage in the Canon where a non-returner says that at his level of attainment you don’t identify around the five …
- A Poker Mind… You want to end up with a sense of pleasure suffusing the body and awareness suffusing the body, so that they all become one. That’s when you can really settle in. You’ve got to maintain that sense of awareness-and-breath-and-pleasure until the pleasure starts feeling gross. Not gross in the sense of being disgusting, but just not subtle enough …
- The Forerunner of All Things… And you don’t want their misbehavior to become an excuse for your misbehavior. Because your misbehavior then just becomes your bad kamma, regardless of what other people did. That’s part of the long-term that the Buddha has you think about. When all is said and done, the story of your life is not so much what other people did to you …
- The Desire for Things to Be Different… Then you find that the rapture that comes from settling in like that becomes oppressive. It’s too strong. You want something that’s better, something more refined. So you drop the rapture. You get the mind to the point where there’s just pleasure in the body, equanimity in the mind. Then you find that even the need to breathe in and breathe …
- Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge… That’s how you become a good sword fighter. So have that attitude as you go through the day. Your defilements can come up at any time, so you’ve got to be prepared for them at any time. This connects with the third main principle, which is that you’ve got to think strategically. Being heedful all the time, being on your guard …
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