… Because each of us is trapped in the system of interconnectedness by our own actions, only we, as individuals, can break out by acting in increasingly skillful ways. The Buddha and members of the noble Saṅgha can show us the way, but actual skillfulness is something we have to develop on our own. If they find us trying to sleep in the middle of …
… One of the most effective ways of changing that balance of power is to be consciously aware of how you’re breathing and to consciously smooth out, sort through, untangle any patterns of tension that would come up with the emotion. That way you can reclaim the breath, you can reclaim the power of the breath, so that it’s on the side of …
… There’s another passage in the texts where they talk about how once
you settle down, you remind yourself that here you are out in the
middle of a very quiet countryside, not quite wilderness here, but
it’s quiet. All the issues related to back home, if they come up in
your mind, aren’t really related to anything around you. Issues coming …
… This feeling gives
rise to a sense of urgency, but it can become a sense of hopelessness
if it’s not balanced by the sense that there is a way out. Once you
sense there is a way out and it’s something that you can actually do,
that calms the lake, and once the lake is calm, it grows clear.
There’s a …
… can be ardent, alert, and mindful
all at once—in that way, you provide yourself with a safe haven. It’s
the little world you inhabit inside as you fend off the world outside.
As the Buddha said, when you have this refuge
inside, it’s like having an island in the middle of a flood, or like
having a lamp in a dark …
… The way you breathe is very much affected by the states of your mind. When you’re worried, you breathe in a certain way. When you’re happy, you breathe in another way. When there’s anger, there’s still another way of breathing. If you keep at certain ways of breathing, it’s going to have an effect on other aspects of the …
… The
suffering we create for ourselves is real, and the way we create it is
real. Even though we may be operating under illusions, the suffering
we create from our illusions is real. And the way we can solve that
problem is also real.
There’s a passage in the Canon where one of the Buddha’s disciples,
Ven. Gavampati, reports that he heard …
… This is how you put yourself onto the path of the middle way.
The fourth and final of the desires of determination is to train only for calm. Now, calm here functions in two ways. On the one hand, it’s the goal to which you aim; on the other hand, it’s a means to help give you stamina on the path to …
… the level of form as in the middle; to see the past as below, the future as above, and the present as in the middle. Then he taught them to look inside themselves—from the feet below, to the tips of the hair above, and all around in between.
Once they had contemplated in this way, they came to know clearly for themselves. This …
… What’s even better is if you can maintain that perspective even when
you’re in the middle of the game. This is what meditation does. It
gets you in touch with a different level of reality. It’s like tuning
your radio to a different station. The breath that’s the energy flow
in the body: What does it know of gain? What …
… Watch and then test the way you read the experiment, to
see if you really can trust it. Over time, your ability to read things
will get better and better. Your sense of balance will get better and
better. That’s why it’s called the middle way. The whole point of it
is to find true balance. And as with any balance, the …
… But you’re not going to gain discernment that way. You gain discernment from making choices and then learning how to read them. It’s not the case that you’ll go immediately to total understanding of what’s the past karma you’re experiencing right now and what’s the present karma. You learn bit by bit.
Start by trying to get the …
The word samaṇa, which we translate as contemplative, literally
means someone in tune, someone in harmony—someone who tries to live in
harmony with the way things really are. It’s by living in harmony that
you can understand how things are: what causes what, what kinds of
causes are proportional to what kinds of results, and looking for the
best results. In other …
… Along the way, Suppiya the wanderer spoke in many ways in dispraise of the Buddha, in dispraise of the Dhamma, in dispraise of the Saṅgha. But Suppiya the wanderer’s apprentice, Brahmadatta the young brāhman, spoke in many ways in praise of the Buddha, in praise of the Dhamma, in praise of the Saṅgha.
Itiha te ubho ācariy’antevāsī aññam-aññassa uju-vipaccanika-vācā …
… But if you rubbed their heads in the middle of the road—no way! For sure.
It’s all a matter of willingness—accepting, giving up, letting go. When you can do this, things are light. Wherever you’re clinging, there’s becoming right there, birth right there, poison and danger right there. The Buddha taught about suppositions and he taught to undo suppositions …
The Pali word sukha can be translated in a lot of ways*.* Its range
covers everything from simple ease and pleasure to happiness,
well-being, and bliss. The whole purpose of the teaching is to find
true happiness—in other words, to take your desire for happiness
seriously. You have to ask yourself, are the ways you’re looking for
happiness giving you true …
… A good bathman preparing the dough
would mix it in such a way that the entire ball of dough was moist,
with no dry spots, but the water didn’t leak out. That means that you
have to knead the water through the dough the same way that you’d
knead water into bread dough.
So there’s work to be done. This is …
… As for the guild, which is the Ssangha, I was reading recently about
Benvenuto Cellini and how he’d broken from the guild of goldsmiths in
the late middle ages because he thought he was way more talented than
everybody else. And he wanted to promote himself as the Michelangelo
of gold. He did some amazing things, but in the course of his career …
… Even the Buddha himself made mistakes before his awakening,
going down the wrong path many, many times in many different lifetimes
before he discovered the Middle Way. It was through those points in
his practice when he realized, “What I’ve been doing, sometimes for
years, was a mistake,” and he was willing to look for other ways to do
things: That’s what …
… Like those old maps of the
North American continent, the big white space is in the middle. They
knew the coast, but they didn’t know the interior. That’s the way it
is with most of us. We know the surface of our lives, but we don’t
know what’s going on inside.
When you’re meditating, this is what you want …
We Are Not One | Noble & True
… Because each of us is trapped in the system of interconnectedness by our own actions, only we, as individuals, can break out by acting in increasingly skillful ways. The Buddha and members of the noble Saṅgha can show us the way, but actual skillfulness is something we have to develop on our own. If they find us trying to sleep in the middle of …
