Search results for: "Impermanence"

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  2. A Valuable Gift
     … Sometimes it’s good to think about the impermanence of life outside: All the things you’ve worked for, or are working for right now, at some point are going to be washed away, burned away, or just fall apart on their own. So where are you going to find any real happiness? Or that reflection we had earlier, that we’re all subject … 
  3. Warm Your Heart
     … We’re not just here to say, “All things are impermanent, suffering, not-self: Let’s just give up on them.” Even though they have those characteristics, still we can create something really of solid worth out of them. We can create this as part of the path. Making merit is not the whole path, but it gets you started. Dedicating merit reminds you … 
  4. Intelligent Restraint
     … It’s not a generalisation about impermanence. He’s more specific. The big problems arise from within. But they can all cease if you cut the cause coming from within. So you want to keep your focus in here. If anything bad comes out of in here, you hold it in restraint. As the Buddha said, you hold things in check with mindfulness and … 
  5. Right Now
     … What are the topics you’re thinking about? Which direction does your mind tend to flow? Look at it to see that whatever it is you’re thinking about is something that’s very unstable, impermanent, inconstant; that it’s stressful; and that it’s not really you or yours. A lot of the narratives that tend to pull us in over and over … 
  6. Changing the Pleasure Equation
     … Even though they’re impermanent, the effort that goes into at least having a taste of them gets paid off by the pleasure. That’s what we think. As the Buddha once said, it’s because there’s pleasure in the five aggregates that we fall for them. It’s not necessarily the case that we think that they’re permanent or that they … 
  7. The Buddha’s Relationship Advice
     … would you be affected by it?” He says, “It would alter my life.” She says, “That’s what the Buddha meant.” We live in the world where there’s so much impermanence and we find somebody that we really like, that we love, that we get attached to, and there’s a lot of clinging there. The affection is not what the Buddha criticizes … 
  8. Meaning & Purpose
     … You know the scaffolding is going to be impermanent. It’s not going to be here forever. But that doesn’t mean you do a shoddy job of making the scaffolding. You try to do a good job, because after all, you don’t want to fall down from the scaffolding because it was strapped together haphazardly. So you work on the scaffolding, make … 
  9. Anti-slacker Dhamma
    There’s a book that came out recently that promotes what might be called Slacker Buddhism, the idea being that life is suffering, everything is impermanent, therefore there’s no point in trying. We suffer because we try to be happy, so if we just stopped trying then everything would be fine. You can understand this kind of teaching as a corruption of the … 
  10. The Meaning of Insight
     … What are they good for? If you simply say, “Well, everything is impermanent,” what does that tell you about what to do? You could take that observation and do all kinds of things with it. You could decide that nothing is worth striving for at all, so you might as well give up. In other words, that insight on its own can be used … 
  11. The Kamma of Meditation
     … But because the seed is also impermanent, the tree itself will eventually die. But it won’t die at the same time the seed disappears. It dies much later. So you’ve got these two principles interacting, which means that in the present moment you’ve got influences coming in from past actions, you’ve got your present intentions, and you’ve got the … 
  12. Bless Yourself
     … I was watching a TV show just the other day, a French TV show where they interviewed people on the topic of Buddhism, and the person being interviewed was saying that the Buddha’s awakening was that things are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and impersonal, so the whole message was that you can just sit back and let things do their impersonal thing, without trying to … 
  13. Happy About Kamma
     … You see that if you act on any of them either way—either staying or moving to something new—it’s going to entail more stress, more impermanence, more inconstancy. So you look for an alternative. When the alternative opens up, that’s where there’s an experience of the deathless. So the way the Buddha explains kamma and causality is precisely the explanation … 
  14. Breath Meditation, Step by Step
     … Even though there are things in the world that change and are impermanent, the effect that the Dhamma can have on the mind when it’s used with precision is once and for all. The suffering can be gone for once and for all. So do your best to master this skill. Do your best to get the mind in position so that you … 
  15. The Graduated Discourse
     … Heaven is impermanent. When people fall from heaven, they fall hard. You can think about the Buddha on the night of his awakening, having that second knowledge in the middle of the night. He saw beings dying and being reborn in line with their karma, going up and down and up and down. It’s almost as if samsara is playing a trick on … 
  16. The Need for a Purpose
     … We hear so much about inconstancy, impermanence, to the point where some people say, “Well, everything that happens is going to disappear right away, so why bother? Just learn how to accept and be okay with what’s happening.” But the Buddha never said that. Long-term happiness is possible. And it can be attained through our efforts. So, wisdom lies in giving yourself … 
  17. Part II : Common Problems
     … Learn how to see it as impermanent, coming and going, coming and going. And then, even better, just going, going, going, even though it will arise again. You want to focus on its going away, going away so that you don’t feel like you’re in the line of fire or that you’re the victim of the pain. That’s one perception … 
  18. Getting Familiar with Concentration
     … If you’re looking at the inconstancy or the impermanence of mountains and trees and things like that, it doesn’t really hit home. But when you learn to place all of your hopes for happiness on one state of mind and let go of everything else, then you can turn around and analyze that state of mind: That’s when insight opens you … 
  19. Rooted in Desire
     … And I was struck by how many times the authors, when explaining right view, would make a brief mention of the four noble truths and then shift almost immediately to the three characteristics, saying that the four noble truths are true because things are impermanent, unsatisfactory, not-self. That’s the reality out there, and we suffer because we cling to things that change … 
  20. Unraveling the Present
     … Is your mind really still? Is it really solid? Is it really centered? Then, when you start looking at the rest of your life from the point of view of that concentrated mind, look for the stress, look for the impermanence, look for the extent to which these things are not under your control. Ultimately, you’ll turn those same tools around to analyze … 
  21. Breath Energies
     … It wasn’t just that things are impermanent, and therefore they’re stressful, and therefore you should let them go. You use those three perceptions to see more: When things change, when they’re inconstant, what are you doing? Particularly when you’re working with the breath, working with the mind getting it to settle down, what did you do when something changed, when … 
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