Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Training the Mind to Train the Mind… The part that’s doing the training gets more and more skillful as it becomes more and more observant. And the part being trained finds that it really is good to be trained. That’s when the whole mind becomes something you can learn how to trust.
- Generating Desire… The Canon contains a famous account of a former king who becomes a monk. He goes and sits under a tree, exclaiming, “What bliss, what bliss!” The other monks are afraid that he’s recalling his past pleasures as king, so they go tell the Buddha. The Buddha calls him into his presence and says, “I hear you’ve been sitting under a tree …
- Stay with the Breath… What would be ordinarily a sensation of the body, a sensation of the breath, suddenly becomes a thought of some other place, some other time, some other people. Those kinds of thoughts can wreak all kinds of havoc in the mind. Once you move into them, it’s like moving into another world and only then finding out whether it’s a good world …
- The Challenge of Faith… As you examine even your state of concentration, you find it can become more and more refined as you refine your intention, refine your awareness. And then you develop discernment in two ways. One is looking at ways that the mind would leave concentration to take up an object. What’s motivating it? Why did it act on that intention to go out there …
- Breath, Tranquility, & Insight… All too often, if there’s a pain in the body, it becomes a wall to your breath energy. You build up a little cocoon of tension around it, and the breath won’t flow properly. So try to perceive the breath in a different way, as something that can permeate through the wall of tension and not be affected by it. As you …
- Skillful Judgment… Because then the judgment becomes the idea that anyone who’s passing judgment is judgmental, and that’s bad. You’re depriving yourself of the ability to learn. And you’re depriving yourself of the kind of community that comes when there’s a sense of trust. Trust isn’t something you can create by having people be nice and non-judgmental with one …
- Respect for the Precepts… You become alert. You become more mindful, more sensitive to things, and that’s pretty deep—a lot deeper than throwing abstractions around. It takes a certain amount of humility to submit yourself to a precept like this, to say, “I’m going to put my preconceived notions on hold and see what it’s like to really try to live by the precepts …
- Adbusting the Mind… This is how meditation becomes a skill. You see things through consistently from cause to effect, and then apply the lessons to the next cause, and then the next. As your attention span gets stronger like this—as you’re able to observe for longer periods of time and see the connections—it’s a lot harder for your defilements to come sneaking in …
- Chanting Before Meditation… The king had been mystified by the fact that this young man had become a monk to begin with, because he came from a wealthy family. He was young, healthy, his relatives were still alive, and the king was of the opinion that people would become monks only if they were suffering from poverty, from a death in the family, or from bad health …
- Wide-open Awareness… After all, you’ve created innumerable worlds already, so many that you’ve become addicted to the process. Now see what it’s like when you cut through that addiction; what’s there when you don’t create any worlds aside from the world of the breath in the present. Keep your curiosity here with the breath, and let the breath permeate the body …
- Remembering Ajaan Lee… Becoming is part of the problem, and yet you have to create a path, which is a form of becoming, to get beyond it. We’re trying to get beyond fabrication, but you have to fabricate the path. We’re going to be using the insights of what’s inconstant, stressful, and not-self, and yet when you’re developing concentration you’re trying …
- Enlightenment is Not a Hot Dog… And it’s a good one to start out with because, say, anger arises, and the breath becomes our enemy. You start breathing in a way that aggravates the anger, on top of the perceptions that sparked the anger. And the various stories you tell yourself about the situation that can also aggravate the anger. Then you’ve got the breath uncomfortable, tight, constricted …
- Perceptions of Self & Not-Self… craving for sensuality, for becoming, for not becoming. The duty there is to abandon the craving—in other words, to develop dispassion for it. The third noble truth is the cessation of suffering, the fact that suffering does end when you abandon the cause. The duty there is to realize it—in other words, to have a direct experience of it. And finally, the …
- Deconstruct Your Emotions… Some people think of concentration as being a blocking out—and even though there are certain things that you’re blocking out right now, you do have to become very sensitive to the energy in the body. And that’s directly related to things coming up in the mind. It’s your first line of defense when a strong emotion suddenly appears. If you …
- In Cahoots with Your Defilements… When you’re really willing to look at suffering until it gives you that message loud and clear, that’s when you become your own friend. And that’s the most important friend there is. Because if you’re not your own friend, nobody else can really help you. Even if the Buddha were sitting right here teaching you, he couldn’t help you …
- Question Your Defilements… Someone else once asked Ajaan Maha Boowa an easy way to become more diligent in the practice. He said, “That’s a lazy person trying to find a lazy way to become energetic. It just doesn’t work that way.” You’ve got to have the attitude that Ajaan Fuang had when he was very young. He came from a poor family. His parents …
- Endurance with a Purpose… That way, what’s hard to endure becomes a lot easier to endure because you’re not creating unnecessary difficulties for yourself. As I’ve said, this is not endurance simply for its own sake. We endure with a purpose: the purpose of knowledge, the purpose of finding a true happiness, a happiness we can depend on, that doesn’t have to depend on …
- Questions in the Practice… What are you doing right now? Why are you doing it? When you bring your attention to the breath, these things become clearer because these intentions appear right next to the breath. So focusing on the breath is not simply a beginning exercise that you drop later for other things. It’s bringing the mind to the point where it should be: right here …
- Faith in the Practice… That’s when your faith becomes, as he says, verified. It becomes unshakable because it’s gone beyond just faith. You’ve actually seen: This really does work. The Buddha really does know what he is talking about Until you reach that point, there are bound to be times when you wonder whether this all works and if it’s worth it. But again …
- The Third Frame of Reference… As you let go of the thinking and the evaluating, you become much more snug with the breath, one with the breath. So in releasing the mind, you’re also making it more steady. There will still be a sense of rapture, but after a while the rapture becomes tiresome. So you try to focus on a more refined level of breath energy to …
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