Timeless Dedication to the Practice

When you focus on the breath, it’s not all that hard. The hard part is staying with the breath, being consistent. This is the quality of persistence in the practice. You want to nurture the good qualities in the mind as steadily as you can. Don’t let them go for a long drought.

Otherwise it’s like planting a tree. You water it a little bit, and then you forget about it. When you come back, it’s a dead stick. So you plant another tree. Water it a bit. You disappear and come back—another dead stick. Keep this up, and you have just lines and lines and lines of dead sticks. But if you take one tree and you look after it carefully, then after a couple years it’ll give you fruit. It’ll give you shade because it has a chance to grow—because you’ve been taking care of it consistently: watering whenever it needs it, getting rid of the bugs, making sure it has fertilizer, being consistent in your care.

The same with developing the mind: You want to be consistent in looking after the mind. This is why we have restraint of the senses. You can’t be sitting here and meditating all the time. So when you’re out and around looking at this, listening to that, smelling this, touching that, tasting this, you still want to keep control over your mind, watching out for any unskillful states that might be coming up. Then ask yourself, “Am I looking at things in a way that gives rise to greed, aversion, and delusion? Or am I looking in a way that can put an end to those things?” You have the choice. You can look at the same things, but you can look in different ways. The same with listening, the same with all your senses.

It’s in this way that your practice becomes consistent. It’s one that happens all the time. It’s a timeless practice. You’re looking for the timeless Dhamma, so you have to be timeless in your dedication to the practice. That’s what gets you there.