Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 68
  2. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … This is where playing with the breath becomes important, because if you can come to the practice with a sense of energy, a sense of well-being, it’s a lot easier to delight in developing and to delight in letting go. It doesn’t feel like an onerous task at all. In fact, it becomes your sport, to see how you approach the … 
  3. Nobility Through Inner Strength
     … They don’t become our wisdom until we realize, “Okay, if I can change the way I act in a positive direction, that’s wisdom in action.” Whatever skills you need in learning how to talk yourself into doing the skillful thing and abandoning the unskillful thing, that’s all discernment. It’s a strength because you can carry that with you wherever you … 
  4. If These Walls Could Talk
     … There’s that line of thought that says, “If you try to get rid of your unskillful mental qualities, that’s engaging in craving for non-becoming. It’s showing aversion.” Well, there are times when you have to be averse to things that are unskillful. If you let unskillful qualities stay, they’re going to take over. And you’re missing out on … 
  5. Standing Outside Your Thoughts
     … This way, you take on different roles with regard to your thinking instead of just jumping right into a thought and allowing it to turn into a state of becoming where you take on an identity in the world of that thought. These perceptions, these analogies, allow you to think of yourself standing outside. This may involve a sense of you, but it’s … 
  6. Restraint
     … If you give in to them, they become more and more habitual. There’s that voice in the mind, say, when lust comes up, that tells you, “If you don’t give in to me, you’ll never be rid of me.” And we believe it, even though giving in to it means it’s going to come back. It’s the same with … 
  7. How & Why We Meditate
     … As you’re working with the breath, you also become sensitive to two other kinds of fabrication the Buddha talked about. One is called verbal fabrication, which is the way the mind talks to itself. It directs its thoughts to a particular topic and then it starts evaluating the topic and deciding what it likes and what it doesn’t like, what it wants … 
  8. Alone at Death, but Not Lonely
     … These can become your friends. The ardency is the quality of the will that goes into this, and the evaluation is the quality of the observer. William James once talked about two kinds of truth: truths of the will and truths of the observer. A truth of the observer is one where you can’t let your will get in the way. If you … 
  9. Observant & Ingenious
     … Two simple principles, but they work together to become complex: “When this is, that is. When this is not, that is not.” Then, “From the arising of this comes the arising of that. From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.” The first of those two principles is immediate causation—when the cause appears, the effect immediately appears; when the cause goes … 
  10. Examine Your Happiness
     … A lay person who becomes an arahant has to ordain because that person just doesn’t want to store food, doesn’t want to take from the world anymore. Such a person is willing to live off what is offered day by day. The idea of going out and taking things from other beings is repugnant. Only if those beings are happy to give … 
  11. A Refuge Inside
     … But if you realize you can’t look there for your gratification, that you’ve got to look into the mind and develop good qualities in the mind that become your home, become your refuge, then ultimately you can find the real refuge inside, which is release, liberation, *vimutti—*a state of mind that nothing can touch. But until you get there, you’ve … 
  12. The Real Thing
     … These states of becoming that you inhabit, that you are, are things you just create in this way. There comes a sense of real disenchantment with the whole process. A desire to get out. So if you see what’s arising along with the suffering and say, “Oh, this is the cause of suffering,” you see it directly. Then you let go. You don … 
  13. Analysis of Qualities
     … All those people in the past who were almost suicidal were able to turn themselves around and actually become noble ones, become arahants, to find true happiness, to find true freedom. It’s something that any human being can do. So it’s good to think in these larger terms. It takes the sting out of your personal pains right now, out of your … 
  14. An Auspicious Day
     … So when you learn how to think about death in this way, this is when it becomes auspicious. It augurs well for the present moment and for your future. Again, you might hear people say that we don’t practice for the sake of the future, that we don’t want to have any goals. But actually, everything you do has to have a … 
  15. Not What You Are, What You Do
     … To the extent the Buddha does talk about what you are, it’s far along the path of dependent co-arising, way up there in what’s called bhava or becoming. It’s not a question of what you inherently are, good or bad. Very simply, your being comes about from what you do. That’s the reverse of the way most of us … 
  16. A Heart Wider than the World
     … This takes you back to your discernment, so that what you’ve taken on as a working hypothesis becomes clear as you see what’s happening in the mind: where the mind grabs on to things, clings to them, thinking that it’s going to find happiness, and in the course of its search for happiness in that way, it’s making more suffering … 
  17. Three Levels of Evaluation
     … The sign that your evaluation is going well is that the sense of fullness in the body becomes more and more pronounced, with a sense of ease, wellbeing, pleasure simply in being here with the breath, being here in the body, letting all the different breath channels in the body connect so that everything in the body feels unified. All of this depends on … 
  18. Guardian Meditations
     … And in doing so, your discernment becomes *your *discernment. It’s not borrowed goods any more. It’s something you’ve learned how to produce yourself. And when that discernment becomes yours in that way, that’s when it’s really effective.
  19. Seclusion
     … As Ajaan Lee used to say, “You’ve worked so hard to become a human being with a human mouth. So bow down to your mouth every day.” In other words, use it to say good things. We’ve all been common animals in the past. What kind of things could we say? We could bark, we could meow, we could neigh, but we … 
  20. Occupy Your Body
     … The fact that the mind is still means that the brain is using less oxygen, and so the need to breathe becomes more and more refined, more and more gentle, until it can stop. The first time this happens, it can be a little scary. You realize, “Oh, my breath has really stopped.” You can’t remember how long it was since you took … 
  21. Judging Your Meditation
     … Eventually, evaluation becomes part of the concentration practice. It’s one of the factors of the first jhana. As when you first sit down to look at your breath, you’ve got to evaluate: Does the breath feel good? Does it not feel good? What would feel better? When you choose a point to focus on, which spot is going to be most congenial … 
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