Search results for: "Persistence"
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- Feeding on Open Wounds… your generosity, your virtue, your ability to find pleasure outside of sensuality, your discernment, your persistence, your endurance and forbearance, your truth, your determination, your goodwill, your equanimity. As you develop these good qualities, you benefit, and the world benefits as well. It benefits even more when you pull yourself out of the feeding chain and leave good things behind. It’s not as …
- Different Paths Go Different Places… Discernment, patience, persistence, mindfulness, and concentration: All the good qualities of the mind get sold off in most people’s lives. So it’s a question of making a wise, intelligent trade. We see the pleasures that other people are enjoying, but we can’t see their pain. This is why, when looking at other people’s lives, sometimes we think, “Well, that looks …
- Training the Mind… Be persistent without, at the same time, getting frustrated. Keep in mind the fact that you’ve been allowing the mind to wander for who knows how long. The Buddha calls this samsara. Samsara takes place on two levels. There’s the samsara of going from one lifetime to the next. But there’s also just the samsara of the mind wandering around, checking …
- Pain Is a Noble Truth… With Ajaan Fuang, it was a persistent headache. Ajaan Suwat, it was a case of malaria. Ajaan Maha Boowa, it was sitting long, long hours in meditation. In every case, it came from realizing that what the Buddha said in his very first sermon, “pain is to be comprehended,” is one of the most important things he said. So keep this in mind when …
- The Mind Comes First… generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truthfulness, determination, goodwill, equanimity. Try to develop these qualities as you go through life because you can take them with you. And they’ll provide a good place to go. They do offer some shelter. When you can’t depend on the world, you have to learn how to depend on the mind. So you’ve got to …
- A Real Education… This is an important part of persistence and patience in the path, because sometimes the results take time. You have to learn how to talk to yourself to keep your spirits up. There’s a novel by Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers—his retelling of the Joseph story from the Bible. In one part of the story, Joseph has been thrown in jail …
- Appropriate Attention Plus Admirable Friendship… As they engage with other people, say, in a trade, or in business, are they fair? You get to know the person’s persistence, or patience or endurance by how they put up with difficult situations. And you get to know their virtue by living with them and being observant. You have to be observant in all these cases. Just because people sound friendly …
- Heedfulness All the Way Through… This is how conviction leads to the next strength, persistence, which is identical with right effort. You see that there are some things in the mind that are skillful, others that are unskillful, and this is where your actions come from. You do your best to promote the skillful qualities inside: things like renunciation, goodwill, compassion. And get rid of the unskillful ones: sensuality …
- All About Change… strengths like conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment. They may be weak now, but as you exercise them, they do get stronger. We were talking the other day about comparing exercising the mind to exercising a muscle. There are some parallels. For one, there’s a lot of repetition. But if it’s nothing but repetition, the muscle gets worn out, and the same with …
- Terror & Revulsion… Through the practice, you’ve been learning these strengths of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, these strengths that nourish the mind. As you practice, you want to feed on these things. But ultimately they put the mind in a position where it’s so strong that it doesn’t need to feed anymore. That’s where it’s skillful to develop nibbida. The …
- Simplify… mindfulness, alertness, persistence, clarity of mind. These skills are basic to all skills in life, so make sure that you really have them mastered. Whatever you have to give up in terms of time devoted to other things in order to master these skills, it’s a wise trade, a trade that leaves you with something far more valuable than whatever has been abandoned …
- The Skill of Patience… But if you’re really persistent, if you have some patience, it’ll start to wear down. A lot of the results in the meditation come slowly—or they come suddenly, but only after a long time. You have to spend quite a while getting the conditions together before the quick insights or the quick sort of quantum leaps in your concentration will happen …
- Modest, Unentangled, Unburdensome… This is directly related to the internal quality of persistence, because you’ve got a lot of unskillful qualities in your mind that you have to sort out. The more you get entangled with other people, the less time you have for your real work. Even when you do have duties that involve other people, you learn how to have a sense of just …
- Your Own Karma… Mindfulness, the ability to recognize what’s skillful and unskillful; persistence, rapture, serenity, concentration, equanimity: When these things arise in the mind, you want to encourage them, either through thinking or not thinking. Sometimes we think that meditation is not thinking but sometimes you need to think in ways that encourage skillful qualities in the mind. This is why the Buddha has that whole …
- Choices that Matter… In other words, you use your desires, you use your persistence, you use your powers of analysis. Things that the other methods said that you had to cut off, were things you actually used. Your heart was engaged as well, as you looked for a happiness that was lasting, a happiness that wouldn’t harm anyone. It’s by using the whole heart and …
- Ānāpānasati Day… Ask yourself, “Is this skillful? Is it not?” If it’s not skillful, what alternatives do you have? And then there’s persistence. You try to abandon what’s unskillful and develop what’s skillful. When you do this well, there’s a sense of fullness, rapture, refreshment. We think of skillful and unskillful simply as duties to be developed and abandoned. But remember …
- The Power of Action… But if you’re persistent, give yourself pep talks, and remind yourself of times when you dealt with difficulties in the past and were able to overcome them, then you can see that here’s another example of how you can do that. And you’ll have a good story to tell. If you’re not telling other people, you can tell yourself, “That …
- Step Outside the World… mindfulness, analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture, calm, concentration, and equanimity. Mindfulness leads you there, and then when you get to the fourth jhana—where you’ve got the last two factors for awakening—you’ve got purity of mindfulness. That’s the only place where mindfulness is really pure. At the same time, the mind is really solid. It’s firmly in its frame …
- What’s Relative, What’s Constant… Generosity, in the sense of really giving yourself to the practice, corresponds to persistence, energy, effort. Unbroken concentration corresponds to intentness. And playfulness is a part of your using your powers of analysis: trying something out, seeing what works—if that doesn’t work, using your ingenuity to figure out something else. Try to master just these issues of bodily, verbal and mental fabrication …
- Body & Mind from Within… to come into being, to persist, to pass away. It’s important to note two things about this teaching. One, the Buddha didn’t celebrate dependent co-arising or the fact that everything is interdependent. When things are interdependent, they’re unstable. Any happiness that relies on interdependent conditions is going to be unstable, too. So if you want to find true happiness, you …
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