Search results for: "Persistence"
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- 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 …
- The Power of Intention… your persistence and your mindfulness. And when you really are ardent at this, the mind will settle down. When the mind settles down, it’s got a home. It’s got a good safe place to stay. So look carefully at what you’re doing. Try to monitor the mind. It’s almost as if one mind is watching the breath, and another mind …
- Developing the Path… For discernment to become a faculty—in other words, a dominant factor in your mind—you have to actually develop conviction, persistence—which includes developing virtue—and then mindfulness and concentration. In other words, all the factors of the path have to be developed for right view to really become strong, to have a good solid foundation. Not only do you have to do …
- In Earnest… The five strengths—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—are healthy food for the mind, food that teaches it to be more and more independent, less and less reliant on its old kinds of feeding, its old kinds of food. When you think of the image of feeding—that it’s not just you gobbling down stuff but you’re also on fire—it makes …
- Three Perceptions… things like mindfulness, persistence, and concentration. At that stage, the Buddha doesn’t have us focus too much on these three characteristics. He has us focus primarily on the doing. As part of the doing, we hold on to other perceptions: the perception of breath, say, or the perception of whatever our meditation object is. We make that prominent. And we try to push …
- Unentangled Compassion… That’s what allows you to develop your persistence, your energy in the practice. Again, it’s a quality of ardency. Ardency just doesn’t mean a quantity of effort. It means learning how to adjust your effort so that it’s just right, appropriate to what’s going on right now. In other words, if unskillful qualities come up, if you find yourself …
- Acceptance & Equanimity… In the factors for awakening it comes after mindfulness, analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture, calm, and concentration. So obviously it’s something good, but it’s never good on its own. And the Buddha says it’s something you want to develop. We already have equanimity in an ordinary, everyday way. Something happens and you don’t feel one way or another about it …
- Doing, Maintaining, Using… You’re learning persistence. You’re learning truthfulness. Once you’ve made up your mind you’re going to stay here, you really stick with that intention. All these are perfections, paramis, that you want to develop. Or you can think of it as like physical exercise. It’s not enough just to go out and exercise once, and say, “Okay, I’ve done …
- A Good-natured Attitude… You have to approach the meditation with a good-natured attitude because it’s going to involve work and require persistence. You could look at it as a long chore, but it’s wiser to find some way to make it enjoyable, so that it’s not a matter of struggling, struggling, struggling – all in hopes that something really good is going to turn …
- Cut the Currents… As the Buddha said, you develop the faculties of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—all the qualities you need to keep the mind strong and still, not flowing out anywhere. That’s what keeps you safe. So, this is our practice. We try to keep the mind with the breath. Any thought that has to do with anything else besides keeping the mind …
- Mindfulness, the Gatekeeper… You focus your persistence based on that desire in one of four ways: If you see that unskillful qualities have arisen, you try to get rid of them—see what you can do to get them out of the mind, get yourself past them so that you don’t get sucked in by them. You do what you can to prevent unskillful qualities from …
- Stay… Analysis of qualities, persistence, rapture, these things have arisen within me.” This is part of the mind’s dialogue with itself. So if you see something that needs to be abandoned, you abandon it. If you see something that needs to be maintained, you maintain it so that you can shepherd the mind in to a state where it feels perfectly balanced. And then …
- Merit & Skill… You’re trying to develop conviction and persistence and mindfulness and concentration and discernment. And that’s just one list. But as you gain a more and more intuitive sense of balance, and of how to combine lots of skills together, that’s what’s going to keep your practice from going off course. There’s a tendency in Western Buddhism to look down …
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