Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Raise Your Standards… What did you do? What was the perception, the change in perception, change in mental fabrication? What caused the stress to go up? Letting go of what caused it to go down? Things you didn’t even realize you were doing suddenly become clear. That’s how you can see where you’re causing unnecessary stress. A lot of it we simply assume to …
- Comprehending Clinging… Then, when the rewards come, we get stuck on the rewards and become unskillful again. In some ways, the round of saṁsāra is like a sick joke. People behave well, they gain their rewards, then they behave poorly around the rewards, and then they fall. So you’ve got to see that even mundane right view has its limitations. As for habits and practices …
- The Values of Stillness… And as you learn how to stay here longer and longer, this becomes your default setting. That way, when these issues come in, you realize that these thoughts are disturbances barging in on your stillness. The stillness is there first. That puts you in a much better position to look at those things and figure them out. Then, when greed arises or irritation, fear …
- De-thinking… If you don’t raise questions you’ll just sit here – in, out, in, out, in, out – and it becomes very mechanical. After a while you’ll wonder what you’re doing, because you’re not doing anything. So ask questions. Sometimes the questions should be aimed at getting the mind to settle down. If the mind isn’t settling down, ask yourself, “What …
- Brahmaviharas & the Breath… They really do become thoughts that are for the purpose of motivating your actions as you deal with other people when you leave meditation—and providing a generally good energy field that people will pick up. I remember reading a story years back. A woman had gone to a meditation class in New York City after having gone to an art class. So she …
- The Path Requires Effort… This way, the meditation becomes a skill. And once it’s a skill, it can really be a good foundation for other things. In other words, you can tap into a state of concentration, you can tap into this state of being centered, whenever you want it. You can learn how to maintain it throughout the day: as you walk, as you talk, as …
- Skillful Attachments… As the sense of ease and well-being becomes more and more established, more and more solid in the practice, you find fewer and fewer things you want to identify with. This doesn’t mean you don’t think at all. You still think when you want to, but your relationship to your thoughts is different. You see them more as tools, things that …
- A Mind Like Earth… Otherwise, you get what they call vipassana mind, where every little thing becomes a major disturbance. Years back, I was talking to someone who worked at a meditation retreat center back east, and I asked him if there was a difference between the people on their metta retreats and the people on the vipassana retreats. He said yes, two things. One was the people …
- Oozing Bodies, Oozing Minds… The first one is sensuality, the second one is becoming, the third is views, and the fourth is ignorance. Sensuality is the big one we have to deal with first. The others are more subtle. It’s a common Western trait that we like to go to subtle things first, the assumption being that once you take care of the subtle ones, and common …
- Clearing Your Space… We start thinking, and all of our thoughts become interesting. You have to realize that some of your thoughts are not all that interesting after all, especially the obsessive ones that keep going over the same things again and again and again. They have their hooks, so you have to learn how to shave off the hooks. The first thing to do is just …
- Savor Your Breath… This way, the meditation becomes something that’s not just in your head. It’s down there in your body, the whole body, and it provides you with a place you can settle in. From then on, it’s just a matter of modulating things so that they feel just right. Sometimes a rhythm feels good for a while, and then not so good …
- Dualities… So the Buddha’s trying to get you to become sensitive to the soot on your own walls. And the way to do that is to compare your different states of mind. So you want to get the mind really, really still—as still as you can. And then, when it’s no longer quite so still, compare it. What happened? What’s the …
- A World of Limitations… That’s the one task where they can truly say, “The task is done.” This is one of the constant refrains in the texts, when someone becomes an arahant and has finally gotten rid of all the defilements: “The task is done. What had to be done has been completed.” You can imagine the intense sense of calm that comes with that. So it …
- For Your Future’s Sake… But then, if we just stay with their pleasures, we become attached. Some people say, “Well, you can be wisely attached. Hold on for the duration of however long something is going to be there, knowing that it’s going to go, and then be ready to let go hold on to the next thing and the next, as if it were a kind …
- Practical Wisdom… That’s when emptiness becomes a useful tool. The same with not-self: You look at the defilement and it’s not yours. It may claim to be yours, but you don’t have to believe that claim. Ask to see the receipt where you bought it. And it doesn’t have a receipt to show. Or as Ajaan Lee says in his talk …
- Recognizing Fools… When the mind becomes clear, these things appear. They rise to the surface. Not everything down there in the basement is good stuff. Sometimes some good stuff has been repressed, but sometimes a lot of crazy garbage has been festering in the darkness. These things get lodged in your mind, just as they get lodged in your body. So learn how to be a …
- Pleasure Has a Price… Because your time and energy are limited, the question becomes either/or: Which pleasure do you want to place your hopes in? Which pleasure do you want to rely on? Which pleasure do you trust? Which pleasure is not going to have a huge bill, a big karmic tally, at the end? It’s got to be the pleasure of concentration. That’s the …
- Mistakes… Look in the Jataka tales, the stories they tell about the Buddha’s previous lifetimes leading up to his becoming Buddha. It’s interesting to notice that in some of those stories he breaks the precepts, except for one: He never lies. But the four other precepts get broken here and there. The Mahayana explanation of that is that he broke the precepts out …
- Safe at Home… Somebody becomes driving up and says, “Hey, come on, jump in.” You jump in and you go. Then you ask, “Who are you? Where are we going?” But that’s kind of late. If you have a strong sense of feeling at home here in the present moment, the situation is more like someone coming knocking at the door of your house and inviting …
- Emptiness… This is why there’s so much emphasis in the training on doing everything you do mindfully—you want it to become a habit—being careful and meticulous in all your dealings. Here at the monastery, there’s no great rush to meet our sales targets for the next quarter, because there are no sales targets. It’s simply a question of being present …
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