Search results for: "Becoming"

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  2. A Safe Haven Through Alertness
     … I don’t have to take that on.” As this space becomes more and more your space, your mind becomes more and more your mind, as both body and mind learn how to get together, stay together with a sense of well-being for both. And as you develop this ability to look in both directions, you find it’s very useful all the … 
  3. Truths of the Will
     … What am I becoming right now?” What kind of person are you becoming? We’re all becoming older, but what kind of older person are you becoming? Are you gaining in wisdom with age? Are you gaining in discernment, gaining in concentration, gaining in virtue? Or is your aging pulling you someplace else? That’s a question you have to ask day after day … 
  4. The Primacy of the Mind (1)
     … If he had gone with the flow, he would have lived his life as a prince, maybe have become a king—and then been forgotten, like all the other kings, princes, queens, and other quote-unquote “important” people in the world. But he took the quotes off: He really did become important by taking a stance. Think of it: someone who wants to find … 
  5. The Real World
     … That becomes their happiness. And of course, your merit isn’t decreased, your happiness isn’t decreased as you share it. The standard image is of having a lit candle in your hand, and there’s someone else whose candle is not lit. If you light their candle, the flame in your candle isn’t reduced. In fact, the light of two candles is … 
  6. Training Wheels
     … You’ve got the aggregates, which are neutral, but then they become part of suffering when they become clinging-aggregates. You’ve got the sense media, which are neutral, too, but they become the topic for suffering when you start developing fetters around what you see and hear and smell and taste; or simply fetters around the fact that you like having these senses … 
  7. Licking Yourself Clean
     … This is how discernment is developed, how meditation becomes a skill. As it becomes more and more of a skill, you become more sensitive to even the slightest bit of discomfort both in the body and in the mind. That’s how you see the four noble truths. You see stress, you see how it’s caused, you connect it to your own actions … 
  8. Useful Vocabulary
     … Craving is what creates a location that becomes a basis for your becoming. It’s the little nucleus or the seed for a becoming. If you don’t know where the nucleus is, you don’t really know the becoming. You just think it’s just something that’s already there and you don’t see the extent to which you’re creating it … 
  9. Is ‘I Am’ the Problem?
     … craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. You crave sensual fantasies. When you see something you like, you crave the ability to figure out in what world it exists, and how you can take on an identity in that world. That’s craving for becoming. As for craving for non-becoming, you’ve found yourself in a world with an identity … 
  10. The Languages of Right View
     … Remember the different types of craving that can lead to becoming. This means that they take you to a new world, they create a new world, and you go living in it. And one of the types of craving that does that is craving for non-becoming. You don’t like the world you’re in and you want to destroy it. In the … 
  11. Things As They Function
     … Now, the term, “things as they’ve come to be” has a special meaning because the Buddha says our problem is that we fall for the craving that leads to becoming, and becoming is your sense of who you are in a particular world of experience. Yet that sense of who you are and that sense of the world have been shaped by a … 
  12. Noble & True
     … Craving to become this, to become that or, once you become something, to have that becoming destroyed: Those kinds of desires are going to make you suffer. The desires that are good for you are the ones that focus on trying to give rise to skillful qualities when they’re not there, and to develop them when they are. Or the desires to abandon … 
  13. The Arrow in the Heart
     … As we create a sense of concentration, a sense of being settled and established here, it’s called a state of becoming. As that word becoming indicates, it doesn’t stop. It’s a process; it keeps going. But this kind of becoming is quiet enough so that you can look into your mind and see: Where is that arrow that keeps us from … 
  14. The Dhamma Wheel
     … The Buddha later said that one of the prime insights of his awakening was to realize that craving for non-becoming was part of the problem. Of course, that presented a strategic challenge: What do you do? You want to end craving for becoming, but if you crave non-becoming, that leads to more becoming. As he pointed out later, the solution was to … 
  15. Heedful of Ruts in the Mind
     … The thoughts that you have will lead to states of becoming in the mind; states of becoming in the mind will lead to becoming on the large scale. It’s there in the first verse of the Dhammapada: manopubbaṅgamā dhammā, manoseṭṭhā manomayā All phenomena have the mind as their forerunner, mind as their chief, they’re made of mind. Who does the making? This … 
  16. The Missing Fabrication
     … In the second tetrad, he talks about becoming sensitive to mental fabrication—feelings and perceptions—and then calming those, too. The question may arise, “Why does the Buddha talk in terms of fabrication?” Especially with the in-and-out breath, why doesn’t he just say calming the in-and-out breath? The answer seems to be that he wants to call attention to … 
  17. Beyond Natural Suffering
     … So you have to learn how to question your need to feed, your need to keep on creating states of becoming. As the Buddha said, even the desire to put an end to becoming, just to block out everything and become nothing, just leads to a different state of becoming. We can’t run away from this process without doing a lot of careful … 
  18. Effortlessness Through Effort
     … When it’s tired in that way, it needs more calming breathing.” When there’s a pain how do you breathe around it? How do you breathe through it? These are specific problems, and as you solve each problem that becomes one more thing that can be done effortlessly. So this is how mindfulness becomes automatic. Not by simply telling yourself, “The present moment … 
  19. Therapeutic Seclusion
     … It gets you out of that mind-state, out of that state of becoming. There was something in that state of becoming where that behavior seemed to make sense, it had a purpose. But then you begin to realize that the world in that state of becoming, your sense of yourself out of that state of becoming, even the object you desire—is all … 
  20. Abandoning Effluents (2)
     … sensuality, becoming, and ignorance. And he gave a list of seven ways to abandon them. As I said last night, the first one is to pay careful attention to the questions you ask, to make sure you don’t ask questions that are framed in the terms of becoming, and instead to look at things in terms of the four noble truths. That approach … 
  21. Cleaning Out the Stables
     … It’s part of a process called becoming, which is the act of taking on an identity in a world of experience. It starts with a desire, and then you cling to the desire. Around the object of the desire, there develops a world in which that object exists. Then there’s your sense of you in that world, both as what will enjoy … 
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