Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 70
  2. Faith in Goodness
     … There are times when it may be difficult to give, but by overcoming the difficulty, we become stronger, and we have more respect for ourselves. So when you engage in the meditation, it’s meritorious. It’s good. The Buddha focuses on the brahmaviharas, and particularly the brahmavihara of goodwill. But goodwill includes compassion and empathetic joy. You see people who are suffering, or … 
  3. A Thorough Cleaning
     … That then becomes your karma. So for your own sake, you want to have goodwill for everybody. This is not an impossible ideal, but it does require detailed work. And in getting down to the details, you’re going to be cleaning out a lot of misunderstandings in your own mind, a lot of bad attitudes, a lot of the crud that develops in … 
  4. Mastery
     … When you’re working on concentration, you’re creating a state of becoming so that you can put the mind in a position where it can finally go beyond becoming. So it’s important that we realize the role of paradox in what we’re doing. Sometimes we have to develop skills that eventually we have to transcend, but you can’t get past … 
  5. Consciousness, Awakened & Not
     … If you look carefully at the formula, you realize that he teaches the path of actions, training your actions through the precepts, training the actions of your mind through concentration and through discernment, so that you can become sensitive to what’s getting in the way of the unconditioned and you can clear it away. That’s his strategy Which is why people who … 
  6. Maybe the Buddha Knew Something
     … So the government came up with the idea of having the monks become teachers. They had no teacher training colleges at that point. Monasteries were encouraged to give land to build schools, and to this day most of the schools you see in Thailand are built on monastery land. Monks were encouraged to—and ultimately told they had to—become teachers in the schools … 
  7. The Balance of Power
     … Then the parts of the mind that want some immediate gratification, they’ll become your friends too, they’ll like it. Then you work on allowing that sense of ease to spread to different parts the body. And this is something each of us has to find our own way of doing. In some cases you maintain your center on that original spot and … 
  8. The Pursuit of True Happiness
     … You can breathe in ways that minimize suffering or actually become actively refreshing, satisfying, absorbing. You find with this simple act of staying with the breath—as you stay with it longer and longer, trying to keep yourself as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels, making a little adjustment here, a little adjustment there—that a sense of ease comes without your … 
  9. Forgiveness
     … If the plan for all of this is that we’re going to become one loving community, we need to get back on good terms with everybody else. Especially if we’re going to be divided into two communities for eternity—those who are on loving terms and those who are not on loving terms—everyone would want to be on the loving-terms … 
  10. Oppressed by Old Kamma
     … But when you become a meditator, you have to realize that these are things you have to free yourself from. You do that by learning to look at thoughts as processes. That’s one way of getting out of their power. So you need the tricks to learn how to deal with them in the same way that people learn the tricks that advertisers … 
  11. Loss
     … So reflection on loss, when it’s done properly, becomes a motivation to the practice. Because you look at the alternative: just more loss, and you come back again for more loss again. Like King Koravya: You come back and you have to fight for whatever you’re going to get, and then it goes away. You have to ask yourself, “Is that what … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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