Search results for: "Conviction"
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- What It All Comes From… But there’s one version where you get to suffering and then what comes next? Conviction. Conviction that there’s got to be a way out. Based on that, you start acting in skillful ways. There’s joy as a result. Based on the joy, there’s concentration. Concentration leads to discernment. And discernment, in turn, leads to release. So, you have to have …
- Genuine Satisfaction… The conviction that there have been people who’ve followed this way before us and they’ve come back saying how genuine satisfaction comes from learning how to let go: Let that article of faith, or that article of conviction, be one of the perceptions that shapes your view of what’s going on. It’ll lead you on to a point where you …
- As Days & Nights Fly Past, Fly Past… So what can you do to make sure that you’re still climbing, climbing? There’s another place where the Buddha lists six qualities that you should look for in yourself, what he calls, “having a sense of yourself.” The first quality is conviction: Is your conviction in the path growing? You know by looking at your virtue*,* which is another one of the …
- Trust Your Desire for Happiness… That requires a certain amount of conviction—conviction even before you’re sure. What drives you is the suffering that exists in your life and your desire to find a way out. The Buddha never forced you. He never said you have to believe his teachings. But he advises you to look at your life. If there’s suffering, then you might want to …
- Three More Recollections… you to think about is, one, what is it that makes a person a deva? And two, do you have those qualities within you? He lists five qualities: conviction, virtue, generosity, learning, and discernment. Conviction is in the Buddha’s awakening. Generosity and virtue we already know. Learning is learning the Dhamma, having a fund of Dhamma within you. Think of the things that …
- Generating Energy… When the Buddha discusses persistence in the five strengths, it builds on conviction. That’s one of the mental ways of giving rise to more energy. Another is in the context of the seven factors for awakening, where persistence builds on mindfulness: keeping something in mind. So what are the ways of giving rise to conviction that are going to energize you, and what …
- Heedfulness for the Holidays… That’s conviction – conviction in the principle of your actions, that when you do good, there are going to be good results; when you do something based on unskillful intentions, there are going to be bad results. You keep on doing good so you can be confident in your good. This is one of the reasons the Buddha would emphasize both generosity and virtue …
- Sensitive to the Mind… So when we operate with that understanding, the understanding of right view, then even though we may not know yet, at least we have the conviction that this is the way out. We apply that conviction and begin to see that it really works. It really is true. We see for ourselves what’s going on in our own minds. That’s what it …
- Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out… They have conviction in the principle of kamma, they’re virtuous, they’re generous, and they’re discerning. You try to become a friend with people like that, and you try to emulate their qualities. You ask them about their conviction, their generosity, their virtue, their discernment, and then you try to follow their example. Most difficult, of course, is the discernment. You find …
- Generating Power… Have a sense of conviction, a sense of confidence in the practice, and don’t try to second guess things. When the concentration has developed to a proper level, it’ll start showing its results on its own. In terms of that simile I often use about the unripe mango: You don’t keep yellow paint on hand just in case, to make the …
- Inner Discontent… Doing things you’ve never done before means putting more into the path than you might want, sticking with it even as it gets hard, with the conviction that there have got be rewards here. It’s part of right effort: generating desire. Sometimes generating desire means generating conviction, nourishing it, looking around and seeing all the suffering around you, and realizing if there …
- Investing in Noble Wealth… So the first step in developing inner wealth is having conviction that it really can be developed. Just as any investment requires confidence and trust, you have to trust in the Buddha’s awakening, that the Buddha wasn’t pretending; you have to trust that he knew what he was talking about: that there really is a deathless and it really can be reached …
- Discernment on the Path… The other four—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, and concentration—are the rafters that you put up. But they’re not really secure until you put that top rafter at the peak of the roof. Once that’s in place, it holds everything else in position and makes it secure. In other words, your discernment is what protects your conviction and your persistence. It guides these …
- Three Levels of Refuge… When you find a good friend like that, the whole point is to emulate that person’s wisdom, generosity, virtue, conviction—what human beings can do. That’s one level of refuge, the external level. Then the next level is that you try to develop the qualities of that person or of those people within yourself. Take the example of the Buddha. His main …
- Tranquility & Insight… We talk about having conviction. Conviction in the Buddha’s awakening basically means conviction in our own power to act, and the power that our actions can have in shaping our lives. We want to make the most of that power. And it’s all happening right here, right now. We look at our minds and realize that we ordinarily act on all kinds …
- Up for the Challenge… Strength of conviction, strength of your persistence, strength of mindfulness, concentration, discernment: These are things you can keep working on. And you’re going to need them, too. Sometimes we like to think that as life reaches its end, things get easier. After all, we’re not as strong as we were, it’s time to rest. But actually some of our most difficult …
- Faith in Karma… It’s based, of course, on the conviction that your actions really do make a difference. It’s a point that the Buddha can’t prove for you. As he says, you’ll know it when awakening comes that, “Yes, that was true.” It was because you had made choices and your choices had power that you were able to gain awakening. But up …
- Practice in Dying Skillfully… You don’t have to worry about those things.” You can hear about it and you can have conviction in it, but there may be part of the mind that’s not 100 percent there—and that can change very quickly, the little bit of percentage that’s not fully on board with this. If you’ve seen the deathless, though, you know that …
- One Thing Clear Through… When you’re radiating goodness from generosity and virtue, you’ve got to go on conviction, you’ve got to go on a lot of internal conversation where you tell yourself that this is a good thing. But when you have the sense of ease and well-being, even the sense of rapture and fullness that can come from the concentration, then it’s …
- Persistence: Lift Your Heart… If we have conviction in the Buddha's awakening, we believe these really are categorical. The problem is that they’re not truths that just sit there. They have duties associated with them. They tell us what to do, what to abandon, what to develop. And here our old habit of picking and choosing our views based on our likes and dislikes runs up …
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