Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 69
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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