Search results for: "Conviction"
- Page 21
- 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 …
- Look After Yourself with Ease… lifetime, there’s happiness in future lifetimes. And again, how are you going to look after yourself with ease when you’re dying? It’s through developing good qualities of mind: conviction, virtue, generosity, discernment. These are the inner qualities that make you more independent, more self-reliant. So that’s what it means to look after yourself with ease: learn the skills you …
- Living Honorably… As long as the mindfulness and concentration are not yet strong, you need other forms of strength, such as conviction and persistence. You’re convinced that this has got to be the way out, this has got to be the way to behave, and this is the noble way to look for happiness. You have to ask yourself: “Are you going to go like …
- Get Out of the Way… This is where patience and equanimity, combined with conviction, are important elements in the path. On days when you’re down, when the mind is just not cooperating, realize that it’s a normal part of the process. The mind is a very complicated thing to train. There’s a passage in the Canon where an elephant trainer is talking to the Buddha. He …
- The Karma of Not-self… You develop attributes that the Buddha actively encourages, like heedfulness, the ability to see that there are dangers lying down the road, and the conviction that you have the ability to avoid them if you’re careful. That’s a skillful sense of self: a sense of self responsibility, self-reliance. As the Buddha said, the self is its own mainstay. In other words …
- To Comprehend Suffering… That’s how you go from conviction to knowledge, from feeling your way around the problem of suffering to actually comprehending it.
- Two Kinds of Middle… You tune your conviction, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment to the level of effort you can manage. In that way your practice stays in tune. In this case, the middle is a midpoint on a continuum. You can slide up or down the continuum and it’s not all that difficult. The question of how much you push, how much you pull back: There are …
- Load next page...
