Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 71
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. Cooking Food for the Mind
     … When you can think in this way, bring your thoughts back to the breath in the present moment and ask yourself: “What kind of breathing would I like right now?” In this way you become an expert cook. You fix food that’s delicious and you learn how to vary the taste from day to day so that you don’t get bored with … 
  13. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … As the Buddha said, if you’re ignorant of this, this can become a cause for suffering. In his explanations for the steps that lead up to craving and then from craving into suffering, there’s something called fabrication. What’s interesting about fabrication is that it comes before your consciousness. It’s how you prime yourself to sense things. If you’re ignorant … 
  14. The Taste Is Release
     … sensuality, becoming, ignorance. Those are the four noble dhammas: virtue, concentration, discernment, release. In other words, the instructions remind us that the whole point of this practice is freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from all the things we’ve been doing. That requires that we take a new view of our own minds. We can’t just go with whatever the mind wants to … 
  15. The Saints Don’t Grieve
     … We’re learning to give up restrictions, learning to get out of the chains that have become so familiar that we’ve learned to mistrust the idea that anybody could be happy outside of those chains. But the freedom beyond those chains is just what the Buddha’s talking about. All his teachings aim in that direction. He said that his teachings all have … 
  16. Directly & Indirectly to the Breath
     … After being taught by the Buddha, he goes and practices and becomes an arahant. The fact that the Buddha didn’t overlook him: You might find that inspiring. I do. Or you might be inspired by the time when, after he’d been practicing austerities for six long years, he got to the point where he realized that no one had ever endured more … 
  17. Avoidance
     … It sounds easy enough—if you’re unskillful, just practice and practice until you become more and more skillful—but you’ll find resistance in certain parts, and this is going to vary from person to person. But a willingness to question your assumptions is basic, and that willingness can be backed up by the realization that you really are suffering and you need … 
  18. 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.
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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