Search results for: "Becoming"
- Page 93
- Subduing Greed & Distress… The more attentive you can be to the breath, the smoother it becomes. It’s like a thread as you run your finger over as it’s running past you. You’ve got to smooth out the thread so that any frayed edges get smoothed back into the thread. The continuity of your attention is what smooths things out in the breath. As the …
- Deconstructing Suffering… After a while, the question should become: Why keep creating these things? It comes down to the fact that the mind is afraid of what would happen if it weren’t creating these things, either fear of boredom or a deeper fear of nothingness. One of the things we have to do as we meditate is to learn how to overcome that fear. Otherwise …
- Pain & Patience… And if nobody is paying attention to us, we just add some more pain on until it becomes obvious that we’re suffering, and we hope somebody will notice and have some compassion for us. This works up to a point. Then it reaches a point where other people don’t want to help any more. So you’re thrown back on yourself. And …
- An Exercise in Freedom… Once that promise to yourself becomes universal—i.e., you apply it with everybody—you’re giving universal safety. They may not be safe from other people, but at least they’re safe from you. And that’s a gift. And again, you exercise your freedom that way. You realize that you don’t have to keep harming people in the old ways you …
- What We Have in Common… He was interested in putting an end to suffering, which meant becoming a noble one, and to do that required that he follow the customs of the noble ones, the culture of the noble ones. After all, the problem of suffering is pre-cultural. Even before we know we have a culture, we’re already experiencing pain, getting upset over physical pain and mental …
- Papañca… They’re the means by which we pull out of our various senses of ourselves and our senses of the world, all the different becomings we could create out of sensations in the body and the mind. We’re in a place where we’re a lot more safe and free from conflict.
- Right View, Right Attention… That’ll help make the breath become more smooth and continuous. And you can create a sense of really feeling at home here, feeling like you really belong. Because this is a state of mind that allows you to watch the mind and not feel hungry for jumping at whatever. If the mind is hungry, then anything that comes along looks like a good …
- Bursting Bubbles… I’ve got other things that are more important.” So always remember that you’ve got the possibility to step outside and look at the thought from the outside, to see it simply as an event, as a state of becoming that’s moved into the mind, but you don’t have to move in with it. You do have that choice. So you …
- Withstanding Pleasure & Pain… This way, your mind becomes something you can trust. And it’s only when you can trust yourself that other people can trust you.
- The Best Place to Practice… It’s not as if they become well-behaved citizens and abandon their dog-aversion, their dog-greed, and dog-delusion. It’s still there, it’s just sleeping. And the Buddha’s attitude is that you’re not going to let sleeping dogs lie. If you want to deal with your greed, you have to put yourself in a situation where you’re …
- The Complexity of Pain… But beyond that, there’s not much in the Canon about how to become more resilient. But the Buddha does talk about how to arrange the mind so that you don’t suffer so much from whatever past karma is leading to the pain. It’s through the development of virtue, development of discernment, development of mind and body, as he calls it: basically …
- Contentment… We’ve got to work from the very beginning, step by step by step, to get to where we want to go.” Those are the ones who ended up becoming the most respected monks in Thailand. So think about that when you’re tempted to wonder, “What’s the next step? I’ve had enough of this. Let’s go on to the next …
- Stretch Your Mind… Just think of how long the time has been that you’ve been going through all these different narratives, to the point where they become meaningless. Then you expand it in terms of space. You think of all the universe. You’re not the only one with lots of narratives. You’re not the only one who’s made a lot of mistakes. You …
- Fix Your Views… After all, one of the adjectives for describing people who’ve attained the stream is that they’ve become consummate in view. They’ve seen that the four noble truths really are true. Their confidence and conviction in the Buddha, Dhamma, and the Sangha have been confirmed. That’s the point where their view really is right. Of course, you don’t stop there …
- Getting the Most Out of the Present… When you can think in this way, then everything in life becomes a part of the practice. None of your time is wasted. Our problem is that we squander our time, even though we may not have much left. In this regard, older people are sometimes better off than younger people. Older people know they don’t have much time left. Sometimes younger people …
- Be Heedful & Think… There’s a famous passage in the Vinaya about the time when Moggallana and Sariputta had both become stream enterers having heard the Dhamma. Sariputta had heard it from Ven. Assaji. Moggallana had heard it from Sariputta. They decided they had to go see the Buddha. So they went to see their teacher to say goodbye, and they invited him to go along. He …
- Serial Clinging Is Still Clinging… Other monks need the hardships of the wilderness in order to become heedful. So this will be an individual matter. As the Buddha said, any pleasure that accords with the Dhamma, any pleasure where you notice that, as you follow that pleasure, skillful states develop in the mind, unskillful states fall away—that pleasure is perfectly fine. The pleasures to watch out for are …
- Circumspection… This base of success requires that some of your experiments will be failures, but if you know how to learn from failures, it all becomes part of your discernment. And it’s all to the good.
- Behind the Scenes… So learn to become fascinated in what’s going on in the present moment. Learn how to anchor yourself here with a sense of well-being so that you can look into these processes. You’ll find that what’s actually happening right here, right now, is a lot more interesting than the movies you create. They have a term in Thailand for the …
- Verbal Fabrication… What is your motive? Is it really going to be beneficial for the listeners, or is it just showing off your knowledge? Or showing off your opinions? If you really think about your speech before you say it, you find that it becomes a lot more effective, and that it gets a lot easier to speak to yourself in the right way as you …
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