Search results for: "Becoming"
- Page 95
- 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 …
- Impatience… Judicious is when you learn how to refine that judging faculty in the mind so that it becomes skillful. We’ve all heard about the evils of being judgmental in meditation, but instead, we need to remind ourselves that it’s good to have good powers of judgment. Learn how to be judicious in what you’re doing. That can come only with time …
- The Flowing Mind… Then, there’s the effluent of becoming. You want to play a role in the world outside. The question is, does the world outside want you to play a role? And what will they do to your role? Think of all the things you could build, the things you could construct outside: They’re going to get washed away. What you do have, of …
- Countercultural Conditioning… But the Buddha was subtle enough to see that even contentment* *can become a source of defilement. You may be proud of the fact that you’re more content with little than other people. So as he said, you’re sensitive to the dangers in using things, how the mind can create defilements even around this. You learn to let them go. In the …
- Strong Against Anger & Fear… That’s how you become strong. So even though there are dangers outside, the typical ways of dealing with those dangers—through force of arms—are not the ones that are the most effective. The Buddha’s approach is counterintuitive in a lot of ways, but it’s counterintuitive only to our greed, aversion, and delusion. When you see things clearly, you see that …
- For a Routine That Isn’t Routine… The problem is, when it becomes a daily routine—or nightly routine—it starts *getting *routine. We go through the motions, stop paying attention, which means we miss out on a lot of the opportunities that come from meditating. So we have to learn how to make it special every night. Part of that we do—which is part of the routine—with the …
- Right Action & Right Livelihood… After all, we are beings—we’ve chosen to become beings by latching onto the different aggregates—and that requires feeding. We feel that our very identity depends on feeding. This is something that all beings have in common. This is the answer to that question, “What is one?” in the Buddhist catechism: All beings subsist on nutriment. Everywhere, all around, they’re feeding …
- Not Siding with the Hindrances… It’s time to get some rest.” You can think about all the lack of sleep you’ve had for the past who knows how many days, and that becomes part of a narrative that convinces you, “Yes, it is time to take a little rest here.” Or if you’re worried about something, it really is a serious problem that you’ve got …
- When Nothing’s Happening… Your insights get more refined because your attention has become more refined. So start with the breath. Is the breath as totally comfortable as it could be? Is it a comfortable breath filling the whole body, every little square centimeter? Look at the areas where you don’t normally look: spaces between the toes, spaces between the fingers, around your eyes. See if you …
- Load next page...
