Search results for: "Becoming"
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- The Need for Goodwill… Practice extra hard so it will be for that person’s long term welfare and happiness.” They say that the arahants in the Theravada tradition are selfish, but one of your motivations for becoming fully awakened is that those who have given you gifts along the way will benefit greatly from that fact. So you’re doing this not just for you, but also …
- Interdependence… That’s how our friendship with one another, our interdependence, actually becomes an asset on the path.
- Realities Right Here… If you begin to bring knowledge and awareness to them, it becomes part of the path. So try to look at your sense of the body in these terms. Look at you mind in these terms as well. What have you got in the mind on this level? You’ve got acts of attention, intentions. feelings, perceptions, contact. Learn to see them on those …
- Switch the Context… That’s also an act of becoming. We were talking the other day about how dependent co-arising doesn’t happen inside you or inside the world. You and the world happen inside the pattern of dependent co-arising, which gives you a greater sense of the fluidity of all this: that your habits are not etched in stone. You’re not etched in …
- The Cost of Happiness… When you realize that you have a choice, and you don’t have to look in ways that are causing harm, causing stress, that’s when you become more skillful. The whole trick lies in seeing these things. This is why the Buddha placed so much emphasis on seeing stress, seeing the inconstancy, the disturbances in the mind. Look for them. He said that …
- The Easy Way Out… You’re becoming sensitive to the actions in your mind: things you’ve been living with all along but you don’t really see clearly because you’ve been looking at them in another way or just looking past them, looking through them. These events that come up in the mind: They’re like signs, a finger pointing someplace. And for most of us …
- Around in Circles… It’s simply a matter of learning to become more familiar with it. How many different kinds of breath are there? There are lots of different kinds. There’s long, there’s short, there’s heavy, there’s light. Narrow, broad. There’s the in-and-out breath, there’s the sense of breath energy that flows through the body, some of which moves …
- Free Sources of Energy… The things that used to wear you down suddenly can become energizing. So allow yourself to think in terms of developing merit. You’re developing the perfections. And although there may be the groups of people who criticize the attitude of building up merit and acquiring perfections as a kind of spiritual materialism, the Buddha was not one of those people. He encouraged you …
- Question & Probe… When you can develop and maintain it, it becomes your safe place. The mind needs a safe place—and not only a safe place, but also a range of weapons or tools: skills that you can use to deal with situations as they arise so that you’re not afraid of them. Especially when you’re dealing with emotional pain, one of the least …
- Collecting Your Tools… As you get more and more skillful at staying in the present moment, it becomes more and more second-nature, easier and easier all the time. And don’t worry about getting stuck on concentration. That’s the kind of thing you can get unstuck from pretty easily. It’s a lot harder to get unstuck from your ideas. Often, things come up in …
- Free Like a Wild Deer… These opportunities don’t come if you’re spending all your time trying to become as wealthy as possible, or as famous as possible, or as powerful as possible. The good things of the mind come when you pare down your concern for material things, you pare down your concern for the world outside and your position in the world outside, and you focus …
- Mental Balance… Your own mind becomes more spacious, and you’re less likely to harm anybody. On top of that, the Buddha notices that when you develop unlimited goodwill, unlimited compassion, appreciation, equanimity, if you’ve got any past bad karma, the effects, if they hit you when your mind is in expanded state like that, won’t be nearly as strong. He makes a comparison …
- The Need for Evaluation… Now, it is a form of becoming. You’ve got the desire to give rise to concentration, and you’ve got the aggregates, which are your field. The desires are the water. Your consciousness is the seed. It’s all right here. And in the process of evaluating how you’re getting the mind to settle down, how you can maximize the pleasure, you …
- Dhamma Opportunism… And if, given your situation, you can look to see where the opportunities are for developing the mind, developing the heart in the practice, then the situation becomes an opportunity. We see a lot of opportunism around us, and it’s very disheartening. People who’ve had long-term political agendas are now advancing them. That’s sad, to see this is what human …
- Pride, Good & Bad… So ask yourself, “When I open my mouth to speak, is it a gift? Or is it simply opening a valve of a pipe and who knows what is going to come out the pipe?” As you decide to be more careful in how you speak, more judicious in how you speak, you’ll discover that your speech becomes something of which you can …
- No Happiness Other than Peace… So if you want to head them off before they become big, you have to be able to settle down here and feel well-established. You’re not going to be pushed off in any direction by anything. This requires an enlarged state of mind, so once the breath starts feeling comfortable, start thinking of spreading your awareness around the body and allowing that …
- Staying Grounded… You look for things to feed on, because after all, as you become the thinker, you’re a being. Wherever there’s the attachment of a being, then the being has to feed in order to keep that identification going. And where you feed, either in terms of physical food or mental food, other people are also trying to feed. It’s as if …
- Your Ancestral Territory… And before you know it, your defilements have seized the high ground, and you become their victim. So when we talk about staying with the breath as you go through the day, it’s not just a matter of maintaining contact with the breath between meditation sessions so that it’s easier to settle down the next time. It’s also your protection in …
- Normalcy… In that way, when the normal things of life come, the mind doesn’t become its own enemy. It can stay its own friend: clear, collected, not doing anything to harm itself or harm anybody else. That’s a mind that’s well-trained, and as the Buddha said, when the mind is trained you find happiness. Even though it may not yet be …
- Faith in Awakening… It’s a wealth that sticks with you and protects you from doing all kinds of things that would become wounds in the mind. Like generosity, virtue gives you a genuine basis for self-esteem and self-respect in that even though other people may be acting in ways that are not restrained, you have the dignity of restraint. You give yourself value as …
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