Search results for: "Becoming"
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- 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 …
- The Strength of Heedfulness… You have to learn how to stay with the breath even though the pleasure can get intense, and then you begin to see that intense pleasure or intense rapture can become tiresome. So you let that go and you tune the mind in to a subtler level of energy, until you realize that equanimity can really be pleasurable. It’s a higher form of …
- In the Context of the Path… craving for sensuality; craving to become, to take on an identity in a particular world of experience; or craving to destroy whatever identity you already have, or whatever world you’re in because it’s not satisfying you anymore. That, the Buddha says, you’ve got to abandon. If you want to understand the relationship between clinging and craving. think of the meaning of …
- Grounded in the Elements… It’s only when we tense it up that the body becomes very clearly defined. You have to do that to some extent, say, when you’re walking or doing any other physical task. But when you’re sitting still, you can allow things to be a little bit more relaxed and loosely defined. That takes a lot of the tension away. When you …
- The Conditions for Goodwill… It becomes totally reliable only with the noble attainments. That’s when the mind has found a basis for happiness inside that really is unconditioned. It makes it a lot easier to have unconditional positive attitudes. Until then, it’s something you’ve got to work at all the time. So learn how to give the mind the nourishment it needs with your concentration …
- Metta & Merit… And I think it was a good lesson for her, because before she’d become a meditator, she liked to dabble in what you would call white magic. The thing about people who dabble in magic is that they don’t really believe in karma. They think they can get around karma with their spells. And seeing the results of karma was a good …
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