Search results for: "Conviction"
- Page 24
- Potentials Past & Present… There’s the strength of conviction that your actions can really make a difference—again, within limits, but the important opening is that you can learn how not to suffer even in the face of bad events. After all, we live in this world of birth, aging, illness, and death. Wherever there’s birth, there’s going to be aging, there’s going to …
- Getting the Most Out of Now… In other words, how can you do this so that the mind will be willing to stay for more breaths the next time around if you’ve found yourself slipping off? Because it is possible, and you’ve got to have the conviction that you can do it. Then when the breath gets comfortable, what do you do with that? You’ve got to …
- Virtue & Right View… These things actually come under the heading of conviction. When we talk in terms of the strengths and the faculties, you’re convinced of the Buddha’s awakening. What does it mean to be convinced of his awakening? You’re convinced, one, that he did it through his own actions. And, two, he learned a lot about the power of human action as part …
- 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 …
- Skills for Dying Well… mindfulness, concentration, conviction, all the other strengths that the Buddha teaches. You want to develop those strengths and you want to see that it’s worthwhile to do so. If you believe that death is the end, then why bother? But if you realize that, in terms of where you go after death, there is such a thing as a good death and there …
- 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 …
- The Wisdom of Ardency… Ajaan Suwat would talk about developing an attitude of confidence and conviction in what you’re doing. If you’re really convinced of the importance of what you’re doing, you’re going to give it your full attention. It’s only when you give it your full attention that you begin to notice things that are not in the texts or in the …
- Technique & Attitude… Then there was the sense of confidence and conviction he felt when he saw forest renunciants: “If there is a way out, that’s the way you have to live.” He was willing to make all kinds of sacrifices in order to find that way out. And once he’d found it, he didn’t have to sell his teaching to anybody. He didn …
- We All Start with an Impure Heart… This heedfulness is based on conviction. There are a lot of voices out there saying that your actions don’t matter, that you don’t have any free choice anyhow. There are the people who will even believe that their DNA forces them to do things, or that the laws of physics force them to do things, that they have no freedom. Some people …
- 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 …
- Possessiveness… of and ask yourself, “What are these things preventing me from attaining, in terms of the good qualities of the mind?” Those good qualities are your genuine treasures. Those are yours: Conviction. Sense of shame and compunction. Virtue. Generosity. Learning. Discernment. These are genuine treasures and they’re genuinely yours. Nobody can take them away from you. So if you want to be wealthy …
- Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates… where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are in terms of learning, virtue, generosity, conviction, discernment, and particularly your ingenuity. So you try to develop these things. Try to get a sense of what you’ve got here in terms of these aggregates, and what you can do with them. Like the aggregate of form: What can you do with the different elements or …
- 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 …
- Reliable Action… They say that one of the essential qualities in the practice is having conviction in the Buddha’s awakening, in the principle that human beings can find true happiness through their own efforts. Here’s the Buddha’s example, and when he talked about his own experience of awakening, he didn’t say it was because he had some special in with a special …
- Right Effort… In other words, you choose the right tightness for your persistence, and then tune your conviction, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment to what you’re capable of right now.” If you find some days then you’re really capable of a lot, put in as much energy as you can. Other times when you find that you’re not up to it, either physically or …
- Head, Heart, & Gut… Now, until you see some results in the practice, it’s going to require some conviction. So you’ve got to learn how to talk to yourself, and this is where the head and the heart come in. When you feel like giving up, the Buddha says to remind yourself that you got on to this path because you wanted to put an end …
- An Examined Life… This gives you a sense of dispassion, but it should also lead to a sense of conviction, that there is a way out by training the mind. Whenever a thought comes up, you can ask yourself, “Where are you going? Anyplace that’s really worth going or some place that’s not?” If it’s not, just drop the thought. It’ll wander around …
- Breath Meditation: Four Sets of Tools… If it’s too sluggish or depressed or discouraged, what can you do to gladden it? What can you do to put yourself in a good mood? Ajaan Suwat always used to say at the beginning of each meditation, “Come to the meditation with a sense of conviction. Come with a sense of inspiration that this is really good work you’re doing here …
- Skills to Make a Difference… When the Buddha talks about how you reflect on yourself as you meditate, he says you reflect on your conviction, you reflect on your generosity, your virtue, your discernment, your learning about the Dhamma, and your ingenuity. To be ingenious, you have to think outside the box a bit. It’s the craftsmen who think outside the box who move their craft forward. In …
- Asalha Puja… We keep being persistent because we have the conviction that this might be the way to true happiness. We’re inspired by the example of the Buddha and the Noble Sangha. We find the Dhamma inspiring. And so we sit here and practice. At the very east, we’re paying homage to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha. And we recollect that this …
- Load next page...
