Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 77
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. The Advantages of Many Selves
     … As you get used to encouraging some of the more skillful ones, that then becomes more and more habitual. The skillful ones get stronger. They can educate the unskillful ones. The ones that are totally hopeless you can put out to pasture. But otherwise, take advantage of the fact that there are lots of “you’s” in there, lots of strategies that you’ve … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. Where to Look in the Present
     … Then, the quality of the intention and all its influences—the perceptions you have, the feelings you have, the things you pay attention to—will become clearer and clearer. So, if anything else comes up in the present moment—any outside sound, outside distraction, inside distraction, whatever—for the time being just let it pass, let it pass. You just want to stay right … 
  10. Rewriting the Mind’s Song
     … Think them every day, every day, day after day, until that becomes the new normal for your mind. Because those attitudes of unlimited goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity are Brahma attitudes—the attitudes of a being on a very high level. And you would like to bring your mind up to that level. Otherwise, you’re on the human level, which has lots … 
  11. Full Attention
     … What quality of breathing do you need? How long, how wide? How much do you want to push the breath into different parts of the body, and to what point does the pushing become counterproductive? Try to take each breath on its own terms. Remember that what you’re doing here is healing both for the body and for the mind. When your nerves … 
  12. A Slave to the Dhamma
     … And who knows where they’re going to lead you? There’s no freedom, there’s no end to the defilements, unless you decide to put an end to them, in which case you have to become a slave to the Dharma. This is the kind of slavery where you can pay your way out of slavery by working hard enough. The work is … 
  13. Karma Storms
     … There’s no place where you can trace back and say, “This person was the first to set things in motion,” or “This person was the first to respond in an excessive way.” When there’s no beginning point, the score becomes meaningless. That helps to depersonalize things. It takes a lot of the sting out of things that you’re thinking about. But … 
  14. Your Intentions Come First
     … The more connected everything is, the less need you’ll feel for in-and-out breathing, and the stronger that sense of being One in the present moment becomes. The body is one large field of breath. That’s one meaning of “singleness of preoccupation.” And it’s what fills the mind. One of the terms for this is, “mindfulness immersed in the body … 
  15. Sunrise, Sunset
     … If you don’t do anything about them now, they become hard to let go. And if you don’t let them go, they’re going to pull you down. So think about this every day as the sun rises. The sunrise may be beautiful, but it may be your last sunrise. You can’t hold on to it. The sunrise goes in a … 
  16. Fear of Others
     … Fear becomes unskillful when it’s tied up in greed, aversion, and delusion. That’s the kind of fear you want to get past. The fear that comes from knowing that your mind has unskillful habits and the conditions could come about where those unskillful habits might take over: That’s something legitimately to be feared. You want to train your mind so that … 
  17. At Ease with the Breath
     … Then, as you get more and more familiar with it, you begin to gain a sense of how the breath can become even more comfortable, even more congenial still. The more comfortable the breath, the easier it is to stay with it—as long as your mindfulness is sharp, your awareness is all around. Sometimes there’s a problem when the breath to gets … 
  18. Jhana & Insight
     … You become really, really sensitive to little disturbances, like the princess who could detect the pea under many, many mattresses. Because the little things that can create suffering in the mind are like that: They’re very tiny, very small when they start out, but then they can grow. If you don’t detect them when they’re small, you’ve missed your chance … 
  19. One Foot in the Present
     … The Buddha talks about bhava, these states of becoming, these little worlds we create in the mind. There’s a very strong sense of location to them. When you actually go into that world, that’s birth. Then you suffer from whatever the limitations that world might be. Your way of getting out of that location is to give yourself another location, i.e … 
  20. Owners of Our Actions
     … That kind of habit then becomes something you can depend on. And even though we’re facing a lot of loss with the potential for illness, death, and separation, we have to remember that certain things are in our control. The body is not in our control. It is to some extent, but in a lot of areas you can’t tell it what … 
  21. Stop & Think
     … you realize that you want to go beyond even the formless states—in other words, to total release—then the issues of the world will begin to fade, and your task becomes clear: You’ve got to get the mind to settle down so that you can see its processes clearly and you can see where the craving is coming from, the craving that … 
  22. Load next page...