Measuring Progress
November 28, 2010
This is a path that we’re following. The Buddha’s first teaching was about the noble eightfold path, and his last teaching was about the noble eightfold path, and the fact that he called it a path underscores the point that it’s meant to go someplace. Yet if you try to measure your progress on the path, it’s difficult. If we were to ask for a show of hands—“Who in here has a practice that every day, in every way, is getting better and better?”—there wouldn’t be any hands. There’s progress on some fronts, and what seems to be regress on other fronts. Yet we still keep at it, partly just on the general principle: You know that if you’re developing meditation, if you’re developing concentration, you’re better off than if you weren’t. Because many things that we would need to make an objective measurement are not there. If you could wind up two doll versions of yourself and say, okay, this doll version is not going to practice, and this version is going to practice, and see where they would end up, you could actually make a comparison. But you can’t see what you’d be like if you weren’t practicing.