Search results for: "Persistence"
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- Tenacity… You cultivate it, you use it to bring all your wisdom and ingenuity and persistence and intentness to this breath. That gets you to the point where you don’t need desire anymore. The ultimate happiness is that fulfilling. As long as you’re not there yet, learn to cultivate skillful desire. Hold on to the factors of the path as tools, because without …
- Concentration: A Balancing Act… analysis of qualities, persistence, and rapture. Analysis of qualities means reading what’s going on in the mind, trying to be as observant as possible. If you’re feeling sleepy, you can ask yourself, “How do the manifestations of sleepiness play out in the body? Where do you feel them?” In other words, give yourself a question to pursue, to pique your interest. In …
- A Memorial to Your Life… The first is persistence: You stick with it. You have a clear sense of what’s skillful, what’s not skillful, and then you motivate yourself to do what’s skillful. Then you reflect. The reflection is basically the intentness and the circumspection with which you do this. Those are the other two bases for success. ** You really give this your full attention: That …
- Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. “Concentration” in both cases means the jhanas, but the theme leading you to develop those jhanas, and from there on into discernment, is something that varies. Some people can just work with the jhana itself. You look at whatever state of concentration you have settled into and you examine it to see: Where is there still any stress …
- Goodwill Plus… Then, based on that, there’s the factor for awakening which is persistence—you stick with this—and that’s followed by rapture. It’s a different kind of rapture from the ordinary rapture of when it feels really good to have goodwill. This is the rapture that comes from insight, when the mind begins to understand how it fashions reality in the present …
- A Safe Space Inside… Then there’s persistence. You really stick with it. Whatever is going to be skillful, you try to give rise to it. Whatever is not skillful, you try to abandon it. You also try to be mindful of the lessons you’ve learned about what’s right and what’s wrong. These are lessons you learn from outside, lessons you learn from your own …
- Feeding Off the Future… This leads to persistence. When you have that kind of nourishment from conviction, it makes it easier to stick with something. Because, again, the path doesn’t always give its rewards immediately or as quickly as we’d like it to. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to give the rewards. Simply that we have more work to do than we …
- The Good We Already Have… This is the persistence that makes the difference. It’s like walking a tightrope. Sometimes you lean too far to the right and fall off; lean too far to the lef and fall off. But after a while, you get so that you can stay on, keep your balance for longer and longer and longer periods of time until it becomes instinctual. You get …
- Fear… that basic principle, believe in the principle of karma—skillful intentions do lead to happiness; unskillful ones, to pain, suffering—you’re going to be very careful about what you do. Persistence comes as the next strength. You just keep at it, because you realize the law of karma is not like a traffic law: It’s not enforced only from 4:30 to …
- Dethinking Thinking… In each case, he developed conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment appropriate to that particular path. When the path didn’t work, he had to ask himself, “Well, why?” That required some thinking, some analysis, to figure out the drawbacks of that path, because that was going to determine what his next path might be. But as for what kind of thinking was actually …
- Good & Independent… This means that from conviction we go to persistence, energy. We do our best to try to figure out what in the mind is unskillful and what in the mind is skillful. We encourage the things that are skillful, like heedfulness, mindfulness, goodwill, concentration. Things that are unskillful, we try to put them aside. Any hindrances that come into the mind, anything that gets …
- Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness… the desire to do it skillfully; the persistence that sticks with it till you’ve mastered it; intentness, paying a lot of attention to what you’re doing; and analysis, using your powers of discernment to see what’s not yet right, trying to figure out how to get around problems, how to solve them. This fourth factor also involves ingenuity — all the active …
- Using the Committee of the Mind… That’s followed by persistence, where you actually try to abandon what’s unskillful, develop what’s skillful. You continue doing that, you keep at it until there’s a sense of fullness that comes from the fact that you’ve been able to abandon unskillful qualities. That’s the definition of the rapture that comes in the first jhana: rapture born of seclusion …
- It’s All in What You’re Doing… They talk about mindfulness, analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture, concentration, serenity, equanimity. That was in one of the sets. All the sets are sets of qualities. So you want to look into the qualities that are motivating you here, and that you’re applying to the breath. In terms of your motivation, the number one motivation, the Buddha said, is heedfulness. You’re reminding …
- Purity Comes Through Discernment… This is where you take all the tools you’ve used in developing concentration—the breath, directed thought, evaluation, perception, feeling—and you apply them to the issue of why that particular thought, why that particular emotion is so persistent. Where is the attachment that keeps digging for it and bringing it out? Simply watching the thought come and go, come and go, come …
- Patience & Consistency… The purpose of this is to give mind a place where it can settle down and be consistent in its gaze, be consistent in its mindfulness, its alertness, its persistence—all the good qualities that nourish the mind. It’s not that you gobble down a huge amount in a short time and then wander off. You take a bit here and a bit …
- Taking the Buddha at his Word… The list starts with conviction, and then goes through persistence, mindfulness, and concentration to discernment. If you’re convinced that there are reasons for these practices, you’ve taken the first step. Then you stick with them. And it’s through sticking with them that, in the activity itself, you begin to see the good results. You start connecting cause and effect. That’s …
- Bodies & Minds Outside… What did they have that you don’t have? They had persistence. Where did they get that? It wasn’t that they were born with it. They developed it. You can develop it, too. This way, the reflection on other people’s minds can lift you up. When you hear about people sitting long hours of meditation, you say, “Why can’t I try …
- Determination… But then the other heart qualities besides goodwill focus on things like persistence and endurance: the strengths that see you through. These depend on the third quality, which is relinquishment. There are things you’re going to have to give up. But when you give them up, you have to give them up in a way that you’re not just depriving yourself. We …
- Break Things Down… And have some persistence.” In the same way, even though we’re told that the final thing that stands between you and awakening is your sense of self, we want go straight there. But you can’t do that. That ladder will fall. You need a healthy sense of self to get up to those higher levels, and that requires going through all the …
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