Search results for: "Conviction"
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- Push Yourself… In the meantime, you have to go on conviction. It’s not the case that in every day and in every way, the practice is going to get better and better, easier and easier. There will be ups and downs. There will be long fallow periods. How you handle those fallow periods is what tests your mettle as a meditator. You have to learn …
- A Seeker’s Habits… You want to develop conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. You work on these, and as you work on these, they begin to make a difference. The one thing he asked you to believe was in the principle of karma: that what you do makes a difference. So as you’re sitting here meditating, it’s not that you’re sitting here waiting for something …
- Courage… He was able to stir up within himself the conviction that even though there is pain in the practice, you can’t let that push you off track. The same goes for mental pain—the aversion, the emotional difficulties that we all face in the practice, especially when you find yourself running up against some pretty strong defilements and they seem just totally stubborn …
- You Can’t Eat the Buddha… s showing us: This is how you learn how to feed yourselves so that you eventually reach the point where you don’t need to feed anymore. You develop internal strengths: conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are qualities we all have to some extent, but we’ve got to learn how to strengthen them, and they in turn make the mind stronger …
- Acceptance Isn’t the Issue… how to have conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, how to be generous, how to be virtuous, how to develop your discernment. These are things we can learn from one another. The people who embody these qualities are the people we should search out; we should learn from them and emulate them. It’s not the case that we accept people or don’t …
- Something Good to Cling to… That helps you develop the strengths that are needed, starting with the strength of conviction that, yes, your actions really do make a difference. And because they make a difference, you have to be very careful about the mind, because actions come from the mind. Persistence: sticking with what you know is skillful, trying to let go of what’s not. Mindfulness: The Buddha …
- Conditions for Concentration… The meditation will develop, and it’ll deepen your conviction in the right attitudes so that both the values and the technique will grow together.
- Give It Your All… Believing, say, in rebirth, believing in the principle of karma, having conviction in these things: That’s a kind of action. What comes about as a result? You put the teachings into practice; you give of yourself by taking them on as working hypotheses. Until you give yourself to them, you won’t be able to judge whether they work or not. So remember …
- Discernment Fosters Concentration… You start with a certain conviction in the Buddha’s teachings and you get to work, get the mind to settle down. When the mind is settled down, then it starts gaining insights. In the seven factors for awakening, though, discernment comes before concentration. That’s for times when it’s difficult to get the mind to let go of its concerns about the …
- Mission Possible… You have conviction, you have virtue, you have generosity, you’ve learned some of the Dhamma. You have some discernment. There was a time when Ajaan Fuang said I needed to use more of my discernment. I told him I didn’t have any. He said, “Of course you have. If you didn’t have any discernment, you wouldn’t be a human being …
- Calm… He said when you start meditating, try to develop an attitude of conviction, an attitude of confidence, that what you’re doing here is really good work. Important work. If any voices come into the mind saying there are other things you have to do right now or things you’d rather do right now, you have to say No to them. And to …
- Not-self in Context… As the Buddha said, when you have a sense of yourself, you have a sense of what talents and skills you’ve developed in terms of conviction, learning, persistence, relinquishment, discernment, and what he calls quick-wittedness—in other words, your use of your intelligence to come up with solutions to problems that haven’t been explained to you. You want to keep tabs …
- Who’s in Charge Here?… Who are you going to put in charge inside? When the Buddha talks about the faculties of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, that word “faculty” basically means who’s in charge in the mind. So do your best to put someone good in charge and make them powerful so that they can keep control over everything inside. That’s how your practice develops …
- Hold on to Right View… But until then, before your conviction is confirmed, or “verified,” as the Buddha said, you’ve got to do your best to keep reminding yourself: This is important to hold on to for the possibilities it leaves open. It’s one of the reasons why he said there are different kinds of loss in life: You can lose your relatives, you can lose wealth …
- The End of the World… Your goodness is crushed only by your own discouragement, by your own lack of faith, your lack of conviction, lack of persistence. Those are the things that crush you, and yet those are also things you can do something about. The mountains keep moving in, moving in. The world is swept away. It’s the nature of the world. If the north mountain doesn …
- Ingenuity… But remember, there was still a question mark there, built into the word, “might.” Could this be the path? And even though there was that conviction that it could be the path, he had to test it. Then, when you’ve developed that testing mind, you’ll know when something passes the test or doesn’t pass the test. Those methods that tell you …
- Renunciate Grief… the conviction that there’s got to be a way out. That’s why there are those five reflections that we chant so often. We’re subject to aging, illness, death, and separation. That’s all samvega. Then we get to, “I’m the owner of my actions, heir to my actions.” That’s the pasada. You focus on your actions. It is possible …
- Feeding on Feeding… He just teaches you a new way to eat—the difference here being that as you feed on the path and develop the qualities of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, these become strengths. Ultimately, they get so strong that they bring the mind to the point where it doesn’t need to feed anymore. This is the part of the practice that really …
- Factions in the Mind… That sense of conviction will see you through the difficult patches and remind you that they’re not always going to be that way: They’re just patches. If you stick with the training, you develop these qualities of the mind, which, at the beginning, seem to be pretty weak — mindfulness and alertness can seem awfully ordinary and very momentary — but when you get …
- Analyzing Anger… You take delight in developing your conviction, your persistence, your mindfulness, your concentration, and your discernment. But then when they’ve done their work, you have to see that they, too, are not the goal. They’re the path. So the very final step is to use this five-factor analysis and apply that to the path, too. That’s when you’re really …
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