Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. What Should I Do?
     … The sense of ease and well-being that you gain from being right here can provide you with nourishment, can strengthen you, so that as you meditate, you’re being responsible, both in creating a refuge for yourself and becoming someone the people around you can depend on, too. We live in a very undependable world, and trained people are few and far between … 
  3. Conviction & Truth
     … Part of this requires that if you’re going to become someone who can pass judgment on the teachings, you have to be the kind of person whose judgment is reliable. This is one of the reasons why we practice meditation, so that we can make our judgment more reliable, make our gaze steadier, and our sense of what’s really a defilement in … 
  4. A Pure Happiness
     … What that means is that our mind’s become purer, not simply through pursuing happiness but also questioning what we’re doing, questioning the results. It’s the questioning that allows for the purifying process. But it doesn’t have to be a process of self-torture. It’s just developing a more and more refined sense of what true happiness is, what the … 
  5. A Gift of Well-Being
     … This inner fabrication then becomes a foundation for the way you act in the world outside as well. It’s a benefit that spreads from right here and radiates out in all directions. This is why it’s important that you maintain your center right here as much as you can, not only while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed, but also … 
  6. What to Keep in Mind
     … That way, your sense of how to maintain your balance will become more and more intuitive.
  7. Treasures Beyond Death
     … The Buddhist way is to learn how to become heedful, and to be heedful is something very auspicious. As the Buddha said, it’s one of the blessings of life is to be heedful: to realize on the one hand that there is aging, illness, and death in life, there’s separation in life: this happens to us, it happens to all people, all … 
  8. The First Noble Truth
     … Because the big problem of the suffering is that you’re often in it, in what the Buddha calls becoming. You’ve taken on an identity in a particular world and it’s causing you suffering. As long as you’re thinking of yourself as, “I’m this person in this world in this situation that’s causing suffering,” it’s going to weigh … 
  9. Keep Things Simple
     … So if we keep things simple, the meditation becomes a lot more manageable. And it’s this simple sort of questioning that helps see through the mind’s subterfuges. The mind sometimes has a tendency to get more and more abstract and to want to deal with really fancy-sounding thoughts. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes. The person who’s willing … 
  10. Where You Set Your Heart
     … the flood of sensuality, the flood of becoming, the flood of views, the flood of ignorance. ** So you’re very definitely making a choice: Where are you going to go? Where are you going to look for safety? There’s a great conversation where King Pasenadi comes to see the Buddha. Pasenadi is usually presented as something of a naïf who, after having gained … 
  11. On Your Own
     … That’s the group you want to identify with so that you can show true love for yourself at the same time you find the excellence of the Dhamma in yourself and become an example to others. In this way, all three governing principles come together. So try to keep these three governing principles in mind, because there’s nobody else out there who … 
  12. Take Care
     … If you put the two together, then everything that’s a part of your life here at the monastery becomes a part of the practice, a part of the development of the mind. I noticed that Ajaan Fuang’s best lay student meditators were the ones who took everything in their lives as a lesson for the practice. Living here at the monastery the … 
  13. Little Things
     … It sustains itself and becomes a source of strength for the mind. In that way, it sustains you. You want to apply this same attention to detail to all aspects of your life — not only while you’re sitting here with your eyes closed but also when you’re dealing with other people, doing work out in the orchard or at the guesthouse, whatever … 
  14. Sensitivity All the Time
     … It will keep developing, becoming an ability to read things more and more carefully, more and more precisely, so that you won’t have to memorize insights from the past. It will keep serving them up, hot and fresh. Like sailing a boat: When you first get out in the boat and they give you the rudder, it doesn’t take long before you … 
  15. Contentment
     … Once you have that sense of direction, the internal path becomes a lot clearer. That’s where you have to be very, very scrupulous, and not allow the states that pull you back to take over. There’s one other element, though, that the Buddha said not to tolerate, and that’s if you find yourself hanging out with people who pull you off … 
  16. Making an Effort
     … In the end, what do you have left? With a life like that, the effort eventually becomes just too much for the mind to maintain. I knew a monk who one night started recollecting past lives—ten altogether in the course of one night. At the end, his memory of the end of each life was just how hard it was, how much effort … 
  17. Discernment Is in the Details
     … So these are all areas where you exercise your powers of evaluation so they can become powers of discernment, figuring out what works for you, what’s just right for you. There are lot of teachings there in the Canon and in the books and tapes of the ajaans, but it’s abstract: principles, ideas, pointers. But you actually exercise your own discernment each … 
  18. Between Right & Wrong
     … Something that was perfectly okay before becomes not okay as you get more skilled. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha uses people with skills as examples for the practice: cooks, soldiers, carpenters, archers. There’s no single “right way” that you can master right away. As Ajaan Lee says, you start out, say, weaving a basket. You look at it and … 
  19. Facing Danger & Hardship
     … And it becomes something of a ceremony. But you have to remember that when the forest ajaans went out into the forest, into the wilderness, they really were putting their lives on the line. The idea of taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha took on extra meaning, realizing that their survival of the good state of their minds was the … 
  20. The Path Is in the Details
     … Sometimes even before it becomes a coherent thought, you can tell whether it’s going in the right direction or wrong. You can then deal with it accordingly. This is how our life gets transformed, by paying attention to the details of our actions, the details of our intentions, right here now. Don’t try to jump over the steps too quickly. This is … 
  21. Crossing the River
     … It becomes like an old friend. In the beginning, when your friendship is new, there are bound to be misunderstandings. But as long as you maintain your goodwill in your determination to make this friendship work, then the breath is always happy to keep coming back, coming back, coming back. So take this as your support. Take this as your object. It’s a … 
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