Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 68
  2. Nuclear Thinking
     … At the same time, it allows your vision to become more all-around, 360 degrees all-around, so that you’re aware of all the little potentials in the body, all the little potentials in the mind that can get provoked in one way or another. That way you can be quicker and quicker to see the very early stages of provocation. When the … 
  3. Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses
     … You want to be able to fabricate this kind of equanimity in daily life so that it becomes easier and easier to fabricate it as you’re settling down to meditate. Put yourself in a position where you really can deal with the breath in the most effective way. Even as the mind starts getting into states of jhana, as long as you’re … 
  4. The Big Picture
     … Thken if the meditation doesn’t go well, that becomes part of the narrative. The Buddha got around that by taking a step back, taking in the big picture, so that he gained a sense of the importance of actions. But he also began to see it in more impersonal terms. And the big picture did give him a continued strong sense of saṃvega … 
  5. All Three Functions of Mindfulness
     … Don’t wait until it becomes full-blown. The second step is to notice when it passes away. A lot of these thoughts come and go, come and go, come and go. When they come, they stir up some hormones. Then the thoughts are gone, but the hormones are still stirred up. You’re still having the physical symptoms, say, of lust or of … 
  6. Protection
     … Then everything inside becomes fake news. But if you hold to this one precept—this is the big one, that you’re not going to tell lies, you’re not going to misrepresent the truth—then you’re protecting yourself. Of course, telling the truth has other aspects as well. You have to know the right time and place, which truths are beneficial to … 
  7. Choices
     … The little movements that you may have missed before become a lot more apparent as you get more and more still. And there’s a sense of freedom that comes when you see the movements but you don’t move with them. A thought may move but you can see it simply as an event. You don’t get into the thought-world. That … 
  8. The Joy of Heedfulness
     … If they become habitual—again, like the water jar, filling drop by drop by drop—you can fill yourself with evil. So you have to be careful, but also remember that the good you do is valuable. Don’t look down on it, and learn to appreciate whatever good you can do. When you find yourself in a bad mood, realize that you can … 
  9. To Begin the Day
     … By doing this, you’re creating a state of becoming, your sense of yourself here in the world, and it’s a healthy becoming based on goodwill. You’re here in the center: This emphasizes the fact that what you do in the course of the day is the central thing you should pay attention to. Other people will be doing other things, sometimes … 
  10. In Line with the Truth
     … Call to mind lessons you’ve learned from the past, examine what you’re doing in the present moment, so that your test of the Buddha’s teachings gets better results, and becomes a genuine test, a fair test, in which you test yourself as well. You find that when you’re true, the Dhamma becomes true for you, too. And we find that … 
  11. The Shape of a Circle
     … That helps keep you from becoming totally wound up in your thought worlds and totally forgetting the practice. As long as you have that much of an intention, that much of a mental note, kept in mind, this is what mindfulness means: You keep something in mind. So keep this in mind, the part of you that can always stand outside of your thought … 
  12. Respect for Heedfulness
     … Because on the one hand it puts the mind in a state where it can see suffering and not be threatened by it; and at the same time that kind of happiness itself ultimately becomes an object you want to explore. You use it as a tool and then, when you’ve taken it as far as it can take you, you turn around … 
  13. The Path of Mistakes
     … This is why the Buddha gives so many instructions on how to learn from your mistakes, how to deal with a mistake so that it actually becomes an important element in the path. There are the instructions to Rahula: When you realize you’ve done something that’s been harmful, you resolve not to repeat it. You also go talk it over with other … 
  14. Don’t Believe Everything You Think
     … But if you look at them from a different angle, they become something totally other. They don’t carry that same weight, the same quality of being convincing. Years back when I was staying at the monastery in Thailand, someone left a book of science fiction stories. There was one that I really liked. It was about a group of people who were going … 
  15. Not Getting What You Want
     … And there’s a cause to the suffering, craving, and three types of craving in particular, all of which lead to becoming: the process by which you take on an identity in a world of experience. But it is possible to put an end to that cause. That’s what the third noble truth is all about: You can develop dispassion for those cravings … 
  16. Cooking Food for the Mind
     … When you can think in this way, bring your thoughts back to the breath in the present moment and ask yourself: “What kind of breathing would I like right now?” In this way you become an expert cook. You fix food that’s delicious and you learn how to vary the taste from day to day so that you don’t get bored with … 
  17. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … As the Buddha said, if you’re ignorant of this, this can become a cause for suffering. In his explanations for the steps that lead up to craving and then from craving into suffering, there’s something called fabrication. What’s interesting about fabrication is that it comes before your consciousness. It’s how you prime yourself to sense things. If you’re ignorant … 
  18. The Taste Is Release
     … sensuality, becoming, ignorance. Those are the four noble dhammas: virtue, concentration, discernment, release. In other words, the instructions remind us that the whole point of this practice is freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from all the things we’ve been doing. That requires that we take a new view of our own minds. We can’t just go with whatever the mind wants to … 
  19. The Saints Don’t Grieve
     … We’re learning to give up restrictions, learning to get out of the chains that have become so familiar that we’ve learned to mistrust the idea that anybody could be happy outside of those chains. But the freedom beyond those chains is just what the Buddha’s talking about. All his teachings aim in that direction. He said that his teachings all have … 
  20. Directly & Indirectly to the Breath
     … After being taught by the Buddha, he goes and practices and becomes an arahant. The fact that the Buddha didn’t overlook him: You might find that inspiring. I do. Or you might be inspired by the time when, after he’d been practicing austerities for six long years, he got to the point where he realized that no one had ever endured more … 
  21. Avoidance
     … It sounds easy enough—if you’re unskillful, just practice and practice until you become more and more skillful—but you’ll find resistance in certain parts, and this is going to vary from person to person. But a willingness to question your assumptions is basic, and that willingness can be backed up by the realization that you really are suffering and you need … 
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