Search results for: "Becoming"
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- Saṃvega & Pasāda… You become a better person to be around. This relates to that second emotion, pasāda. Ajaan Suwat would encourage an attitude of pasāda each time as you begin to meditate, that what you’re doing here is important work. Trying to get the mind in concentration is good for you and for the people around you. As the Buddha said, if you don’t …
- Grasping the Snake… Then, as we engage in these activities, our right views become more precise. The Buddha talks about three kinds of discernment. There’s the discernment that comes from listening and the discernment that comes from thinking things through, but then there’s also the discernment that comes from developing good qualities through the practice. You can listen to the Dhamma, and you get right …
- Right Resolve, Right Concentration… Not that you become a doormat for other beings, but for the time being, at least, you let those thoughts go. The mind needs to rest. So first counteract the thoughts and then allow it to rest. It’s in this way that discernment can lead to concentration. You see the need for skillful intentions and so, on the one hand, you develop thoughts …
- The Knife of Discernment… But when the distinction becomes clear in the doing, then you’ve cut the mind away from those attachments and cravings. When the Buddha said that his job was done, this is what he meant. There were still pains in the body, there were still issues in life, but the mind no longer had to suffer because of them. That’s where Awakening makes …
- Choose Your Battles… But then, the snapping back becomes your karma. You’ve won that battle maybe but you’ve lost a bigger one. So those are the kinds of things you should endure: painful feelings and hurtful words. Things you shouldn’t endure are thoughts of ill will, thoughts of sensuality, and thoughts of harmfulness that arise in the mind. You don’t let them stay …
- Cheating the System… One of the steps, as the Buddha said, is to become sensitive to mental fabrication, which includes your feelings of pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain, and the perceptions around them. But before you do that he says try to breathe in a way that gives rise to rapture, breathe in a way that gives rise to pleasure. That way, you give the mind …
- The Roles of Equanimity… So your equanimity has to work with other qualities in order to be valuable and not actually become an obstacle on the path. You might say this is the equanimity of a hunter. A hunter knows where the animals tend to be, but he can’t make an appointment with them, saying, “Okay, at two o’clock I want a rabbit to come by …
- The Center of Your Life… If you can work through all the issues about why they’re misguided, then the heart becomes more and more One. It more and more coalesces and comes together around this desire to be truly happy, to find long-term happiness, to develop these qualities of wisdom and purity and compassion that can make your happiness true. So this is how you make Dhamma …
- The Best Work Around… It becomes something you really do want to do. The obstacles start to seeming smaller, smaller, and smaller. Years back. when I was staying with Ajaan Fuang, there was a time when we were getting ready to consecrate a lot of amulets that we were going to put in the Buddha image. Someone suggested doing a nine-day and nine-night consecration ceremony, which …
- Self-Bypassing… You want to take that same attitude toward your practice, so that your self becomes more mature—mature enough so that when the time comes to let go, it can let go, and there’s nothing left lurking around, hiding behind denial. You haven’t bypassed anything. You’ve followed the path consistently all the way to your first taste of awakening. You don …
- 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 …
- Learning from Determination… This is why the ajaans and the Buddha talk without embarrassment about developing inner wealth, becoming wealthy inside. Wanting to win a battle. Wanting to master a skill. Making the effort to search for something. It all involves desire, there’s a goal, and that goal often in the future. But in learning how to live maturely with your goals — in other words, realizing …
- 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 …
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