Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Ready for Death… Anyone who has a way of knowing that merit has been done and dedicated to them, if they rejoice in that, they appreciate it, then that becomes their merit too. When there’s a sense of being lost and bereft when someone dies, especially when someone dies suddenly like this, you’ve got to remind yourself: You’ve got the Buddha as a refuge …
- Endurance & Equanimity… You realize that if you respond in kind to what the other person has said, that becomes your karma. It’s as if they threw a hot burning coal at you and you bent down to pick it up to throw it back. Who gets burnt? You get burnt. So endurance requires a lot of talking to yourself. You don’t just squash your …
- Two Roads to the Grand Canyon… It’s not a good term; it sounds like you’re becoming neurotic, but actually, it’s a breakthrough through a neurosis that you’ve been carrying around. You suddenly realize you don’t have to carry it around any more. There’s a very strong sense of coming into the present moment, being freed of a lot of the narratives you carried around …
- A Matter of Life & Death… And as you get on familiar terms with the breath, as you become friends with the breath, you find it easier to carry this perspective, this focus, into all your activities. So even as you go through daily life outside the monastery or outside your regular place of practice, you’ve got an inward awareness that you can begin to depend on more and …
- Not Pained by Pain… When you’re not afraid of the pain and you’re investigating like this, you become a moving target—the pain can’t catch you. But you also see that the sharpest spot keeps moving around; it’s not the same all the time. This alerts you to the fact that the pain is arising and falling away in very quick moments. When you …
- Skillful Thinking… Once you start learning from them, okay, then you become wise. So the basic questions are, always: “What’s the most skillful thing to do here? What exactly is the problem? What tools do I have?” And then work from there. You don’t have to get involved in such questions as who’s creating the solution, who’s facing the problem. Just put …
- How to Read Yourself… But, as I said, one of the basic skills in becoming remarkable is learning how to read yourself, to use your strengths to make up for your weaknesses. That way, as you continue to read yourself and rewrite the story, you finally get to the point where it’s really good to read.
- In the Land of Wrong View… If you want to become a noble one, you have to practice the customs and the traditions of the noble ones.” So if it’s true that even Buddhist countries are lands of wrong view, how much more so in a country like ours, where wealth is measured in terms of material things, power and strength are measured in military terms, physical strength. People …
- A Full Heart… This way, your understanding of what’s going on becomes much more all-around. You begin to realize that what’s going on in the mind is not just in some mental realm without any effect on the body. It’s connected to what’s going on in the body as well. The area of physical sensations and the area of mental sensations: These …
- Riding an Elephant to Catch Grasshoppers… Sometimes you can just drop the stories, other times you have to remind yourself, “Okay, someone mistreated me, and it was awful, but I was able to rise above that, and become a meditator. What do meditators do? They focus on their minds.” The same with your world view: Think about your worldview until you get to the point where the narrative tells you …
- Noble Ardency… That’s where they become really noble. I was reading recently someone who was saying that “noble truth” was a mistranslation of the term ariya-sacca because there’s nothing noble about stress, nothing noble about craving. But really there is if you approach these things in the right way. In fact, the approach is what makes the noble truths noble… If you learn …
- Assumptions… This mind that’s often so obstreperous can become a mind of peace, a mind of concentration, a mind of wisdom. You’re basically working with the same building blocks, just you learn how to use them in a new way.
- Not-self in Context… It’s by making the right choices that better and better choices become available. So follow this issue of trying to be skillful in your actions as passionately as you can. Start with the path. And as for issues of self and not-self, learn to use them as you’re mastering the skills of the path. Putting things in the right context can …
- Steps in Concentration… If you do, it becomes oppressive. Think of all the energy channels in the body being open: The body can be like a big sponge. Everything is wide open all around. When everything gets saturated, things begin to calm down even more. Here, the image is of a still lake with lotuses growing in a lake. They haven’t grown up above the surface …
- Happiness Comes from Inner Strength… Yet if you can find the strength to refrain from harming others—and it does take a certain amount of restraint and forbearance, endurance—you discover that in exercising those strengths, they become more and more reliable. The same principle applies with goodwill. There may be a lot of people out there who wish you ill, but it’s not going to help the …
- The Governing Principle… You become more and more sensitive to what’s been invading your space all along and now you don’t have to suffer from it. You’ve got something to help you battle against those negative energies, both within and without. So once things settle down and they feel good, try to maintain that. Now, there are times when you hit something really good …
- Four Virtues… Your meditation then becomes a very consistent part of the way you live, and the way you live energizes the meditation. Think of all these areas as good opportunities for developing the mind, to find that state of purity that doesn’t have to feed on anything at all, that doesn’t place a burden on anyone. In this way, virtue not only creates …
- Trust in Heedfulness… But as you really focus on this task—and this is where the ardency and the persistence come into the practice, as strengthening factors, based on heedfulness—the clearer the focus becomes. And you really see that it is possible to satisfy your most important desire, which is the desire for a harmless happiness that doesn’t change. Almost every other account you read …
- Unlearning Unskillful Behavior… As you work on some of the more blatant ones, the subtler ones become easier. The spiritual bypassing approach is: “Let’s deal with the subtle ones, and the blatant ones will just take care of themselves.” But it rarely happens that way. If you’re insensitive about things that you’re blatantly doing in life, how are you going to muster the sensitivity …
- The Right Place to Look… So you want to become really sensitive to what you’re doing right now, starting with the subtleties of the breath or the subtleties of whatever other object of meditation you find easy, congenial, pleasant for the mind to stay with. Because it all comes down ultimately to seeing not only the object of your meditation, but also seeing how the mind relates to …
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