Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- Protective Meditations… And those unskillful actions, those unskillful intentions will then become your karma. You leave a big opening. The Buddha’s image is of your hand. If your hand doesn’t have a wound, you can pick up poison and it won’t seep into the hand. You’re safe. If there’s a wound, though, the poison will go right in. So think of …
- Give It Your All… One of the motivations for monks to keep on practicing to become arahants is so that the gifts they’ve received from people—in terms of food, clothing, shelter, and medicine—will give great results to the people who gave them. So part of the motivation is not only for yourself, but also for the people around you. When you go visit Mahayana countries …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… They sometimes talk about getting stuck on concentration or becoming a concentration junkie, but those are cases where the concentration lacks the other elements of the path. Your understanding of why there’s suffering in the world is skewed, or your understanding of why you’re suffering is skewed. You spend all your time just focusing on your breath and not wanting to do …
- Commit & Reflect All Around… That’s when these things will reveal themselves and become clear.
- All Dhamma, All the Time… And how do you become your own island? You make the Dhamma your island. There’s an academic writer I was reading a while back saying that the Buddha probably didn’t want people to take refuge in him, or the Dhamma or the Sangha, just take refuge in themselves. He simply tolerated it when people took refuge in the Triple Gem—that was …
- Reading & Meditating… The more refined and precise their vocabulary, the more sensitive they become to how things smell, how things taste. It’s the same with your own mind. The Buddha provides a very clear vocabulary for what’s going on inside the mind, in terms of feelings and perceptions, thought-fabrications, acts of consciousness, and all the other many elaborations on those basic terms. It …
- Teaching Old Dogs New Selves… As we go through life, we pick up new tricks, new ways for finding happiness, we stash them away, and they become part of our large committee inside. Now, a lot of those ideas have their drawbacks. And we’re going to see this as we start meditating—that there are certain things we identify with that are going to get in the way …
- Generosity of Spirit… That becomes your good kamma. For most of us, our lives are negative feedback, negative in the sense that your unskillful qualities feed on one another. Technically, that’s a positive feedback loop, positive in the sense that it takes one quality and strengthens it, like the howling of a speaker when you place a microphone next to it. But it’s negative in …
- Cooking the Present Moment… So, even though it may be unfamiliar, stick with it until it becomes more and more second nature. In that way, you’re taking advantage of the fact that you do have freedom of choice here in the present moment. As the Buddha said, if people didn’t have that freedom, he wouldn’t have taught. What would there have been to teach? You …
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