Search results for: "Conviction"
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- 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 …
- You’re Already Dead… The first treasure is conviction in the Buddha’s awakening and what it means for your life. In other words, he was able to find true happiness through his own efforts, developing qualities in his mind that you have in a potential form in your mind. Virtue: being restrained in your actions, not harming yourself, not harming anybody else, Having a sense of shame …
- Fix Your Views… Their confidence and conviction in the Buddha, Dhamma, and the Sangha have been confirmed. That’s the point where their view really is right. Of course, you don’t stop there. You learn how to use right view properly to take you even further, from right view to right knowledge. What this means in practice is that, as we’re starting out, our views …
- Getting the Most Out of the Present… Goodwill, he said, is a form of wealth, as are conviction and a sense of shame—the sense that certain actions are beneath you. That’s a form of wealth. Compunction, the attitude that’s not apathetic about the results of your actions that really does want to do things well; virtue, learning, right-effort: These things are forms of wealth that we develop …
- Training Your Cynical Voices… At the same time, learn how to bring in some more confidence, conviction in this path. For most of us, it’s not a path that we learned about when we were growing up as children. It’s something new. And as a result, it often can feel foreign. But what’s really amazing about this path is that it’s common to human …
- The Buddha’s Currency… You think about the people who taught you this, starting with the Buddha, and you get a greater sense of conviction in the Buddha’s teachings. That gives you energy to develop more skillful qualities of the mind as well. You think about the good people who’ve taught you these things, and you realize that you wouldn’t want to do anything unskillful …
- In Training… But he can teach you ahead of time about right view—in other words, something you take on conviction because it makes sense. You don’t know for sure that it’s true, but you know that if you take it on as your working hypothesis, you’re going to act in honorable ways that you feel good about—so you take it on …
- Purity of Heart… We strengthen the mind in our conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. When these qualities are developed, the mind reaches the point where it doesn’t have to depend on any kind of food at all for its happiness. They say that arahants have understood food, and they’re totally independent of nutriment, and, as a result, you can’t trace their path, in …
- Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice… the Buddha said, what determines whether your practice is going to be pleasant or painful is which kind of contemplation leads you to develop the five strengths and the five faculties: 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 …
- A Safe Space Inside… ve got lots of rafters working together in your practice, so simply having right view is not going to be enough. You need support. This is where you develop other strengths. Conviction in the principle of action is the beginning of right view. Then there’s persistence. You really stick with it. Whatever is going to be skillful, you try to give rise to …
- Anybody Home?… We’ve got to roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves, with the conviction that we’re going to benefit from this. Now, you notice that the Buddha never says what’s left after the job is done. If he had said that there were no beings to begin with, you’d wonder, “Then why does he keep saying that the arahant, after …
- The Power of Human Effort… One of the things I’ve always found inspiring about the Buddha was his conviction that human effort can make a difference. And that’s an important point to keep in mind: He wanted to make a difference. All too often, we hear that the teaching is about acceptance, and although it’s true that there are* *some things you have to accept, you …
- To Purify the Heart… But he also knew that if he said it couldn’t be done, Ajaan Lee would say, “Well, in that case, I’ll find someone else who does have the conviction to do it.” So the next morning, Ajaan Fuang got all the able-bodied monks and novices under the ordination hall, wrapped ropes around the thing and tried to pull it, used crowbars …
- Fear… You build up your conviction in the power of your actions, that the good you do is not erased, it’s not for nothing. The effort that it requires is not wasted. When you believe in 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 …
- Overcoming Obstacles… You’re not asked to sign on with total conviction to begin with. But you have to give it a fair chance, a fair opportunity. There are so many dilettantes in the world who have opinions about all kinds of things but haven’t tested anything at all. Their opinions, their knowledge is worthless. If you want to know the truth, you have to …
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