Search results for: "Impermanence"

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  2. Questioning Your Conviction
     … Take, for instance, the teaching that everything is impermanent or inconstant. The ajaans like to point out that there are certain things that are constant. Ajaan Chah talks about how things change, but the way they change is constant. There are constant rules to the way things change. Things may be “not for sure”—as he likes to say, “**mai nae”—but they do … 
  3. Teaching Old Dogs New Selves
     … Self has to be permanent, but the things that we identify as self are impermanent. Therefore, if we notice that—and it’s not hard to notice—we should come to the conclusion that they are not-self. We should let them go. The problem with that approach is that you didn’t arrive at your idea of self as a logical conclusion. It … 
  4. The Rewards of Right View
     … On the one hand, you see that they’re very impermanent, and on the other you see that there are so many unskillful ways in which people go after these things, harming one another. Think of the Buddha’s vision after he gained awakening: He looked at the world and saw everyone on fire: on fire with greed, aversion, and delusion; on fire with … 
  5. The Train Trestle
     … There is some impermanence here, some inconstancy, but relative to a lot of other things in life, this state of concentration is pretty constant. It allows you to put down your guard a bit. As the Buddha said, settle in here. Indulge in the pleasure of the concentration, because the mind needs that sense of pleasure. Otherwise, it’s going to go out looking … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. Evident Inequality
     … In other words, karma is impermanent. The fact that you’re on the low end of the scale right now doesn’t mean you have to stay on the low end. You can rise up. And the means for rising up are equal. The Buddha illustrates this principle with the image of fire. He says that if an outcast makes a fire it’s … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … It’s impermanent.” When it comes, you try to keep it from going. You try to develop it as far as you can. The same with all the factors of the path. But this is where the discontent comes in. Obviously you’re discontent with the mind when it’s filled with unskillful qualities. But even with skillful qualities, the Buddha said you have … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. Don’t Sell the Buddha Short
     … Now, some people take that as meaning that you simply decide that you agree with the Buddha about his teachings on impermanence, suffering, not-self. But is that really “verified confidence”? What would count for him as “verified”? Agreement through pondering views, he said, doesn’t count as verified. Just deciding that you like what he has to say, that’s not verified. For … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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