Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 92
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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