Search results for: "Becoming"

  1. Page 98
  2. Self-Doubt
     … But Ajaan Fuang saw that if you become a doctor, you’re at everybody’s beck and call all hours of the day and night. He didn’t want that. So as he got older, being around the monastery—you’d think the temple boys would have heard a lot of Dhamma, but it goes in one ear and goes out the other until … 
  3. There’s Work to Be Done
     … You don’t turn them into little states of becoming where you slip off and travel around the past for a while, or slip off and travel around the future. You stay right here. The fact that your awareness is so broad helps prevent it from shrinking down so that it can enter into one of your little thought worlds. So there’s work … 
  4. To Be Sure
     … What seemed to be just a nice idea suddenly becomes a reality, a very real reality: the sort of thing that can’t be forgotten. Having a glimpse of that doesn’t mean that you’re totally there yet, because you also realize there’s more work to be done. But from that point on, the Buddha says you’re a person who’s … 
  5. Discernment All Along
     … As you get better and better, your handicraft becomes more and more something you can use for your livelihood. But it has to come from observing what you’re doing: learning from the object you’re focused on. In his case, you learn from the silver. Silver reacts to heat in different ways. You can get rid of impurities in different ways. If you … 
  6. Protest Your Virtue & Right View
     … You can learn how to fabricate thoughts with knowledge, without craving, without clinging, and that way it becomes a path. You’re turning the present moment into a path that leads to something beyond the present moment. So this is the message of right view: that everything you need to know is within your power. Even when things get bad outside and a lot … 
  7. Factors for Stream Entry
     … Take the case of Anathapindika, who was a treasurer in Savatthi and a very busy man, but he had become a stream enterer. Once he was visiting a group of adherents of other sects and they wanted to know from him what the Buddha’s views were. And here he was, a stream enterer, yet he said: “I really don’t know the entirety … 
  8. Seven Facets of Discernment
     … I’ve told you many times that with Ajaan Fuang, as I was becoming his attendant, he never told me where things went or what things should be done. He told me what they shouldn’t be, sometimes, especially if I’d done it wrong. So I’d have to guess: What’s the right way to do this? What’s the right way … 
  9. Strategies for Generosity
     … You become more and more sensitive. It’s like listening to a piece of music. If you’re humming to yourself inside, you don’t hear a lot of the subtleties in the music. But if you make yourself very, very quiet inside, some of the subtler things begin to impinge on your awareness. You notice them. It’s the same with the mind … 
  10. The Gift of Meditation
     … This way, your skill becomes more balanced, and you develop a range of skills for dealing with different situations. Sometimes the situations are determined by events of the day, sometimes by the physical condition of the body right now. As a skilled meditator, you want to be able to have an approach for whatever the situation. It’s like being a good cook. You … 
  11. Maintenance Work
     … But if you’re observant, you become sensitive to the signs that tell you when the mind is about to slip off. It hasn’t gone yet but it’s getting ready to go. It’s tensed up and ready to jump. When you can sense that tension, you simply relax it. Meticulously. And that way you can keep the mind more and more … 
  12. No Foolproofing
     … The clear seeing, which is what genuine vipassana is all about, comes from trying to be very, very skilled in keeping the mind still and developing more sensitivity to how it may become even more still. What little things are you still doing that are knocking it off balance? The answers to these questions again fall under the duties of the four noble truths … 
  13. Bad Friends Inside
     … The question of trusting other people becomes less and less important because you’ve found something really reliable inside.
  14. Dethinking Thinking
     … This becomes a useful way of dealing with pain. Pain tends to get glommed together with the earth element, your sense of solidity in the body. Of course, that makes the pain seem solid. So to get past that, you learn how to question the solidity of the pain. You experience the breath before you experience the pain: Think of it in that way … 
  15. Suppressed Emotions
     … As for the pain, that also becomes something you can approach with the tools you’ve learned from your technique. Try breathing through the tension around the pain. If the pain is in your knee, you can think of the breath coming in and out right at the knee. Or you can think of it going down the leg and through the pain in … 
  16. The Brahmaviharas Are Not Enough
     … Dhanañjanin dies and becomes a Brahma – achieves union with Brahma. Sariputta then returns to see the Buddha, and the Buddha says, “You left him in an inferior attainment,” and chides him for not taking him further. There’s another passage where the Buddha’s going to be leaving the monastery at the end of the rains retreat. Mahanama comes to him and says, “Suppose … 
  17. Limitless Thoughts
     … The mind becomes more fully here so that you can observe it, so that you begin to watch it in action. The Buddha’s approach to dealing with the problems in the mind is not so much tracing things back to what you did as a child, as they do in psychotherapy. He has you focus more on looking at your habits right now … 
  18. The Four Frames of Reference
     … the floods of sensuality, the floods of views, the floods of states of becoming, of ignorance. These things come flowing out of the mind, and if you don’t have an island, you drown. It’s by staying with these four frames of reference that you create an island for yourself that the flood waters will not overcome. Keep this in mind as you … 
  19. Timeless Dhamma
     … You become sensitive to how your perceptions of the breath affects rapture and pleasure. In other words, what ways of thinking about the breath can give rise to feelings of intense rapture? Thinking of the breath as a quality of the whole body, not just the air coming in and out of the lungs, changes the way you relate to the breathing process and … 
  20. Endurance
     … Then whatever else is added on just becomes too much. But if we don’t weigh ourselves down, these other things can’t weigh us down. So when you find yourself facing a situation that’s hard to endure, remember those steps in the breath meditation. Be sensitive to the potentials for pleasure, even in the midst of the hardship. And regardless of whether … 
  21. Nibbana Is Better than You Think
     … Questions of meaning become meaningless. Listening to that from our side of things, it doesn’t sound all that attractive. But as the Buddha said, if you think that there’s anything negative about the experience of nibbana, that would be wrong view. So, reserve judgment. Take it for granted that the ability to put an end to suffering would be a good thing … 
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