Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- Unskillful Habits… Actually, you don’t have to count the times, just keep doing it for a while, so that it becomes second nature. That way, as soon as the mind starts cooking up an image that would get you attracted, you can tell yourself that there is this other side as well. Having a basis in the breath enables you to step back, so that …
- The Fourth Frame of Reference… This is where the two frameworks of the hindrances and the factors for awakening become useful. When you sit down and try to get the mind concentrated, it’s useful to figure out exactly, “What’s going on here? Which hindrance is bedeviling me right now?” Once you’re able to classify a disturbance as sensual desire, ill will, torpor and lethargy, restlessness and …
- Read the Breath… So we’re sitting here focusing on the breath not simply because the breath can become a comfortable place to stay—although it is a good place to hang out, with a sense of ease in the present moment. The Buddha said that is one of the rewards of concentration, but you can’t just sit there and eat up the rewards. Ajaan Lee …
- Breath by Breath… Meditation is a little thing that becomes big because you do it continuously. Just keep the mind with the breath. Try to make the focus of the mind just right—in other words, not too heavy, not too light. If it’s too heavy, it’s like holding a chick in your hand and squeezing it so hard that it dies. If it’s …
- Turtle Mind… You become more impervious to outside influences, especially energies coming from outside, because your energy in the body is full. The image the Buddha gives for an untrained mind is of throwing a piece of rock into a lump of clay. The rock goes into the clay very easily. As for mindfulness immersed in the body, the image is of a hardwood door. You …
- Present Kamma… What am I becoming right now?” or “What am I doing right now?” If the Buddha were here to ask you that question, how would you respond? The best response is to say, I’m training my mind.” What do you do to train the mind? There’s the karma of the present moment, and it’s made up of three things that you …
- Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad… There will still be a sense of rapture there, but then after a while the rapture becomes tedious. It’s like food. When you’re really hungry, you want as much food as possible, but after you’re well-fed, food doesn’t seem so attractive any more. In the same way, when the body’s really tired, you want as much rapture as …
- Heedfulness & Confidence… Otherwise, heedfulness degenerates into anxiety and becomes unskillful. We get stressed out over things that we shouldn’t get stressed out over and we sap our strength, so that when the time comes that we need to use our mindfulness and alertness and ingenuity to solve a problem, we don’t have the energy. An image that the forest ajaans use a lot: You …
- A Touchstone at the Breath… If you believe A, then it means you believe B, and then it means you believe C, and they all become a cluster. The cluster gets bigger and bigger until it’s overwhelming. It takes over your whole worldview. But if you can use the breath as a solvent on that glue, you begin to see there’s just this idea and then there …
- Fire Escapes… But the end of the universe, in terms of the suffering of the universes of all your becomings, he says, can be found in here. You don’t have to go out there. So, stay in here. Get to know this space really fully. The end of suffering is to be found in this fathom-long body. That doesn’t mean that it’s …
- The Reality of Your Thoughts… They become things in and of themselves. And that kind of thinking, the Buddha says, stirs up a lot of trouble—in fact, it’s the kind of thinking that leads to conflict, both with other people and within yourself. In some contexts, he said that *all *thinking is a type of objectification; but in other contexts he separates them out—that it is …
- The Role of Attachment… Meditation would become a chore. I actually know people who think that meditation is suppose to be a chore; you’re not supposed to like it. But that kind of meditation gets very dry very quickly, and the sorts of insights you may get from it are also very disorienting and very dry. For solid insights, you want to put the mind into a …
- When it’s Hard to Settle Down… Make yourself aware of the whole line, and then from there you can give the line more of a three-dimensional quality so that it begins to fill out the rest of the body, while your focused awareness and your background awareness all become one. It’s when the mind fills the body like this that it doesn’t have any extra hands to …
- Breath Meditation: The Fourth Tetrad… The stronger your concentration, the more constant it becomes. That makes it easier to see the subtle inconstancy of other things. You’ve got a point of comparison. You see the pleasure that concentration offers and you compare it to the pleasure that these other things—these other feelings and mind states—seem to offer. You realize that what they offer is not that …
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