Search results for: "Conviction"
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- To Delight in the Path… So you learn to take delight in doing good, being generous, helping other people who are generous, being with admirable friends—people who have conviction, virtue, generosity, and discernment. These things lift not only the mind, but also the heart. Remember, we’re training both the heart and the mind. In Pali, the word *citta *covers both. So the practice is not just a …
- Paying Off Your Debts… The list starts with conviction, conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, that he really did awaken to something special. It wasn’t just the result of his cultural conditioning or his preconceived notions. He learned an awful lot in the course of his quest for awakening. He tried out various paths that occurred to him, which were basically the common paths in those days …
- Mindfulness as Refuge… It takes strength to say, “No.” Part of the strength comes from your conviction that what inhabits your mind really is important because it’s going to come out in your actions, and then your actions are going to shape your life, and you want a life that’s well shaped. So you have to start with the seeds. You have to start with …
- Strength Training… The Buddha talks of the path as a path of strength, and the strengths of the mind are conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. The Buddha has one way of formulating the path in these five terms. He himself often compares the path of practice to various skills, and some of them have to do with strength. The skillful meditator is one who can …
- Preparing to Die Well… You have to develop a strong conviction that the sacrifices you might have to make in observing the precepts are really worth making, that there are some things of greater value to be gained by letting go of the pleasure derived from those unskillful activities. Without that conviction, you can’t change your unskillful habits. So you’ve got to develop that conviction, keep …
- Faith in Goodness… When talking about having faith in the principle of karma, or conviction in the principle of karma, it sounds rather dry and theoretical. But if you think of it as faith in goodness, it gives you a better idea of how you should relate to it. We have this power within us to do good and to act on motives that are selfless, not …
- Taking Initiative… Their conviction will remind you that what you do has to be skillful. You can’t harm anybody. That carries over into your virtue. With the generosity, you share what you’ve got, because what you share then becomes yours in a deeper way. In other words, you develop the perfection of generosity. It becomes a good quality in your mind. Your mind becomes …
- The True Cause of Suffering… As the Buddha says, the best way to overcome that kind of doubt is not with blind conviction. You need to have conviction in the principle that your actions really do make a difference, but that’s not asking you to believe in anything impossible or illogical. The Buddha gained his awakening by using qualities that you already have in a potential form. And …
- Clearing a Space… Discernment needs the strength that comes from concentration, that comes from mindfulness and alertness, that comes from your conviction in the principles of kamma. All the five strengths—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—have to work together. Otherwise your discernment will just start analyzing things and get further and further away from what’s actually happening in the mind. That’s not the kind …
- Four Determinations… When you have a certain opinion, where did it come from? And why are you holding to it? When you’re careful about this, you realize how little you really know and, when you’re taking on the path, how much you actually take on conviction. That also means that if you’re operating on conviction, what can you do to confirm it? You …
- Choices… Feed on the conviction that your choices really do make a difference. Feed on the fact that you can put effort into this, and that it’s effort well spent. It’s effort that gives rise to energy rather than wasting energy. So choose to stay with the breath and keep that choice in mind. Try not to forget. Be alert to what the …
- To Escape the Prison of Time… This is why faith in the Buddha’s awakening, or conviction in the Buddha’s awakening is so important. We don’t like the word faith—it’s become the F-word in modern Buddhism—but there are certain things we have to believe if we want to find true happiness. One is that our course through life doesn’t begin with this particular …
- Reflect on What You’re Doing… Or there’s just conviction: “This is just got to be the way it is.” Here again, focus on the conviction: Do things always have to be that way? This is where you can think about Ajaan Lee’s question, “To what extent is this insight true and where would it not be true?” It’s like the insight that all cars drive on …
- Inner Wealth… The first is conviction. Technically, it’s conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, but what it means for us is the fact that human beings can, through their own efforts, find happiness. Their efforts really do make a difference. We do have an impact through our actions on the happiness or the lack of happiness we experience. This thought is empowering because it encourages …
- Acceptance… All the good qualities in the mind that the Buddha talks about developing—mindfulness, alertness, ardency, conviction, persistence, concentration, discernment: These are all things we have to some extent already. If we didn’t have them at all, we wouldn’t be human beings. It’s simply a matter of taking stock of what we’ve got and having the conviction that if we …
- Cutting the Fetters… As the Buddha said, the conviction that overcomes doubt in the Buddha has to be confirmed. What’s going to confirm it? Being convinced of things simply by thinking them through is what the Buddha calls arriving at an agreement through pondering views. And that, he says, can sometimes be true and sometimes false. So it doesn’t qualify as confirmation. There has to …
- Reinvest Your Noble Treasures… You’ve got the profits of conviction, of a sense of compunction, shame, virtue, learning, generosity, discernment. You gain these things. You can use them for all kinds of purposes. There are a lot of people who use their discernment just to gain more money—that’s a real waste. Use your discernment to find the deathless. Reinvest your noble treasures. And you’ll …
- The Inner Saboteur… You have to ask yourself, “What kind of happiness do I want?” Do you want a happiness that’s going to let you down, that’s going to disappoint you? Or do you want one that’s totally reliable? Do you have the conviction that there is such a happiness, and that you can reach it? A large part of you will probably say …
- Learning from What You Do… finding people who are exemplars, people whose virtue you admire, whose generosity you admire, whose conviction and discernment you admire. Try to learn from them, talking over these issues, emulating them in areas where they’re worthy of emulation. Because we do have our blind spots: That’s what ignorance is all about. It’s not an abstract thing. It’s being ignorant of …
- Death Is All Around… Your true treasures are things like conviction in the principle of your actions, a sense of shame at the idea of doing anything that’s not noble, concern for the harm that can come from unskillful actions, virtue, learning, discernment, generosity: These things are your treasures. People can take your body away from you, they can kill you, but they can’t take these …
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