Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Practice Without Gaps… In that way, as your virtue becomes more continuous, it becomes a good foundation for your concentration. You get used to not making exceptions for your likes and dislikes. This is one of the problems of the world right now. There are people who say they honor the precepts and the principle that you shouldn’t be harmful—except for these cases or those …
- Suffering Starts Before Life… These are precisely the things that constitute becoming—a desire, the world in which that desire can be fulfilled, and your identity within that world—which is why they say that craving conditions clinging, clinging conditions becoming, and it’s from becoming that birth happens. In other words, you actually go into that world and that identity. You go into that act of feeding …
- Strategic Thinking… The cause of suffering is craving, specifically craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for not-becoming. To abandon the cause of suffering and to understand suffering, you take some of those elements out of those two noble truths and you plug them into the fourth noble truth: the path to the end of suffering. In other words, you learn how to use the …
- True Protection for the World… We need those attitudes, both to help immediately in the course of the meditation, and to carry into our daily life to protect ourselves from our own unskillful impulses, our unskillful intentions—so that we can become our own refuge. In other words, when you internalize the example of the Buddha, and the Dharma becomes part of your daily behavior in your thoughts, your …
- In Touch with Your Fabrications… You’re trying to depersonalize the whole process because emotion is a state of becoming. You’re taking on an identity here in the body with these feelings. If you’ve found that it’s causing you to suffer—even the best states of becoming will have some element of stress, but if they’re blatantly causing you to suffer, why go for it …
- An End to the Stories… As the Buddha said, the craving that makes for becoming is a big issue. You make something from that becoming and then you become a being with needs to feed. You live in a world where other beings are trying to feed as well. There’s going to be conflict. So you have to remember that the becomings in your mind are not just …
- Calm & Insight… To calm the mind, you want to find someone who’s good at calming his or her mind, and you ask, “How can the mind be made steady? How can it be unified?” “Steady,” in the sense of being with one object; “unified,” in the sense of actually becoming one with the object. As when you’re focusing on the breath: In the beginning …
- Self-hatred… But everything else we want, in terms of sensuality, the sense of becoming, or even the sense of non-becoming—when you don’t like yourself, when you want to obliterate yourself: These are all causes for suffering. Even the self that doesn’t like the self is a form of non-becoming. So you have to watch out for it. Remember how you …
- Friendship… When you’ve got this stable center, then the issue friends outside becomes less desperate. And when you’re not desperate for friends, you find you get better ones, more reliable ones—because you’ve become more reliable as well. So it’s important that you take some time to develop this skill. Do what you can to become interested in the breath and …
- To Comprehend Suffering… All of that is a becoming. Those becomings happen in the mind all the time. Then they can play out in the world outside, as becomings on the macro level, as you take on a new identity with each birth. And here again, your thoughts of becoming in the mind could go precisely as you want them to, but there’s still going to …
- Samvega for Samsara… Then we just make another becoming, as that chant says, *saṃsarantaṃ bhavā bhave: *“wandering on from becoming to becoming.” We create the worlds and then we go into them. It’s not that the worlds are already there, ready-made, and we just move in. We play a role in creating them. And the Buddha advises us to stop—at the very least, stop …
- Worthy of Trust… The virtues of the Dhamma become our virtues, we build them into the mind. The virtues of the noble Sangha: We become members of the noble Sangha. That way, we become not only a refuge for ourselves, but also for other people. They can trust us. This is one way which our practice connects with the practice of other people. Often you hear it …
- As Days & Nights Fly Past… It’s: “What am I becoming as days and nights fly past?” This is a question he has you ask yourself every day: “What am I becoming as days and nights fly past?” It’s an interesting question. We all know about the teachings on not-self and going beyond becoming, but here the Buddha’s asking you to reflect on yourself and what …
- Befriending the Breath… Tell yourself you’re going to become friends with the breath. All too often, what happens when you’re meditating and you have trouble staying with your meditation object, is that it starts to become your enemy, your opponent. You try to squeeze it and force it down, to get it under your control, but that just makes things worse. It gets more and …
- Wild Horses… The Buddha actually identified the cause of suffering as three specific kinds of craving that he said led to further becoming. Now, the term ‘further becoming’ can refer to new states of becoming in your mind as you go from one thought world to the next to the next, but it’s also his word for rebirth. Remember that image he had of how …
- Beyond Sound-bitten Dhamma… What am I becoming right now?” What you’re becoming depends on your actions. So what are you doing, and what kind of person are you becoming as a result of what you’re doing? Maybe you’re becoming more compassionate. Maybe you’re becoming more mindful, more circumspect—or less. That’s something you’ve really got to look into. If you don …
- Sitting & Walking… What usually happens is that the thoughts turn into a states of becoming: in other words, a world of experience in which you take on an identity. You’re in the thought. But here you maintain your original becoming as a walking meditator, so you can watch the thought from the outside. That’s how you gain the insight into how these becomings develop …
- Surveying the World… In either case, you’re going to have passion for the maintenance or passion for the destruction, and that passion will create more becoming and then more becoming. But if you just look at the events that would lead up to becoming, if there has to be a becoming, let it be the becoming of concentration, where you’re focused on your inner world …
- One Thing Clear Through… As it settles down, settles down, it finally becomes clear. All the mud settles to the bottom and the water becomes clear. It’s not totally clear yet, but at least it’s clear enough for you to see what’s going on inside. That’s when you develop the gift of discernment, in which you realize the ways in which you’re causing …
- The Dhamma Wheel… the desire for sensuality, the desire for becoming, and the desire to destroy becoming. Because we’re thirsty in these ways, we feed off the things that we identify with, that we cling to. So the duty here is to abandon these three kinds of craving. Craving for sensuality is not so much craving for sensual pleasures as craving for the mind’s activity …
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