Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Spread Goodness Around… That then becomes a meritorious act on their part. In other words, they appreciate goodness. And the more we can develop an appreciation of goodness in the world, the better off we’ll be. So as you’re meditating, it’s a good way of developing inner worth, which then becomes a happiness that spreads around. It’s the best way to look for …
- Off the Continuum… If you’ve been developing insight, analyzing things, but the mind can’t really settle down, he says to go find someone who has mastered the ability to get the mind to settle down and ask him, “How do you get it to settle down, how do you get it to indulge in this pleasure, so that you really do become settled in there …
- Fabricating with Awareness… This is how your knowledge becomes a skill. It’s interesting that the word the Buddha uses here, avijja, is the negative of vijja. Vijja can mean not only knowledge, but also the kind of skills that, say, a doctor or an animal trainer would have. And the Buddha often compares himself to a doctor and to a trainer. Basically, you want to become …
- Samsara… And all of them have a potential for becoming a path. With form: The word has many meanings, but one of them is your internal sense of the body, the shape you feel sitting here. Focus in on that as your object of meditation. There’s a breath moving through that shape. In fact, the breath is actually the basic point where you make …
- Strength in Humor… If you find yourself in a bad state of becoming, humor can pull you out. You can step out of it a bit. This is your survival technique. You need this. Look at all the great ajaans. One of things that they all have in common is they all had good senses of humor. They’re able to laugh at themselves. It’s not …
- Love is Conditional, Goodwill Is Not… And the idea of meeting up with that person again all of a sudden becomes something you’re afraid of, perhaps because of complex emotions when you were together. But even the fact that if you loved one another really strongly, now that the other person is dead and if you were to meet up with that person’s spirit or a vision of …
- 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 …
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