Search results for: "Persistence"
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- Slogging Through Difficulties… This is how persistence becomes less and less of a big issue, because you realize that it’s just one moment at a time. The old story that every journey starts with one step or is taken one step at a time: Remember that. Years back when I was in Thailand, sometimes there would be heavy rains during the almsround—rain and wind—and …
- Learning How to Learn… There’s concentration based on desire, concentration based on persistence, concentration based on intent, and concentration based on powers of analysis. Actually, all four of these things have to be present in any state of concentration. It’s simply a question of which one is dominant. With desire, of course, the desire has to be focused on the results—what do you want out …
- Listening to the True Dhamma… The second set has to do with qualities you develop inside, like contentment persistence, and modesty. In other words, you’re content with material things so that you can focus on the main area where you can’t rest content—which is the mind. As long as it isn’t fully skillful, you want to continue developing it. Persistence—whatever Dhamma urges you on …
- The Equanimity of a Winner… From that conviction, you develop your persistence. You’re mindful. Mindfulness doesn’t just mean accepting what comes up. It means keeping things in mind, remembering to be alert and ardent in putting aside whatever’s unskillful and developing what’s skillful. Concentration builds on that. In other words, when your efforts at being mindful get successful, the mind can finally settle down. When …
- Well-armed Efforts… That’s when you’ve got to use your soldiers, your right efforts or your persistence, to get those things out of the fortress. Now persistence requires two things. One is the desire to do this. You have to want to put an end to suffering for it to happen. It’s not going to happen on its own. And then two, it needs …
- Factors for Awakening… Then, based on that, you develop the factor of persistence, which is the same as the ardency in right mindfulness, and the same as right effort. And to encourage persistence, it’s good to develop heedfulness, realizing that you really do need to develop skillful qualities now. You can’t wait until tomorrow or next week or next month or next year. You need …
- Making an Effort… Once you have the desire, then you work on persistence: The practice is something you stick with over time. And as the formula also says, you “uphold your intent.” In other words, you keep focused on the issue of what’s going on in the mind, whether it’s skillful or not. Those three qualities—desire, persistence, and intent—are also involved in three …
- Getting Untangled from Thorns… To really understand them, though, you have to resist them and learn how not to get discouraged when they overcome your resistance, but just simply ask yourself, “Okay, where was the weak link in my resistance here?” So we have to use a combination of patience and persistence with these thoughts, in the same way that getting my blanket untangled from the thorns required …
- Mindfulness + Discernment = Intelligence… Of course, doing this—making this distinction between what’s skillful and what’s not, and trying to do what’s skillful—automatically brings in the third factor for awakening, which is persistence. Here the intelligence of persistence is looking at things in terms of cause and effect. You know that there are certain things you like doing but you also know the ultimate …
- A Genius about Your own Mind… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are all things we have to develop and in many cases they require a lot of work. Having conviction in the Buddha’s awakening is pretty demanding because it sets forth the possibility that human beings can find a deathless happiness. There are a lot of people, even people nowadays teaching the Dhamma, who shy away from …
- Know the Dhamma by Its Results… contentment, “shedding,” and persistence. Contentment means learning to be satisfied with a situation. If it’s good enough to practice in, it’s good enough for you. We could probably think of all kinds of standards for judging this place as being deficient. It may not be the ideal place or your ideal place to meditate, but it’s good enough. And if you …
- Success on the Path… From that desire develops persistence: the energy, the stick-to-it-iveness that’s required in training the mind. After all, the mind has a lot of old habits. And it’s going to take time and persistence to deal with these things. So it’s important to learn how to give yourself energy all along the way. Persistence as Ajaan Lee says, goes …
- Caught in a Thorn Bush… And that can come only with time and persistence, which is where the active patience comes in. The Buddha’s image is of a goldsmith working with a piece of gold: Sometimes he puts it in the fire; sometimes he takes it out and blows on it; sometimes he simply looks at it. Putting it into the fire is an image for effort; blowing …
- Strength of Conviction: 1… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. Of the five, conviction is the most basic. All the rest depend on it. One of the Thai ajaans once said that we tend to think that discernment comes from reading a lot, from having a lot of ideas and developing our thoughts, but it actually comes from conviction. Because what kind of discernment are we looking for …
- Booster Stages… It requires persistence as you stick with it day in, day out. You have to develop an attitude of consistency in your effort. This confidence and conviction can also lead to the strengthening your mindfulness and concentration. This is the kind of inner dialogue that’s actually helpful: learning how to encourage yourself, learning how to remind yourself of the rewards that come from …
- Friends with the Breath, Friends with the Buddha… It’s very easy to fall for the voices that are very insistent, persistent, insinuating, so you need a good friend inside. In addition to the breath, it’s also good to think of the Buddha as your friend. When a question comes up, ask yourself: What would the Buddha say? We all know the story of Sona the monk who’d been very …
- A Refuge in Quiescence… There’s persistence, where you actually try to act on your knowledge about the possibilities of skillful and unskillful action. If any unskillful qualities come up in the mind, you try to get rid of them, and then you try to prevent them from coming back. As for skillful qualities, you try to give rise to them; once they’re there, you try to …
- Right Effort… You want to generate desire, arouse your persistence, uphold your intent, for abandoning unskillful qualities that have already arisen, and for preventing unskillful qualities that haven’t arisen from arising. Notice that desire is an important part of the practice here. This is where the Buddha explicitly recommends it as part of the path. And again, the way to spark that desire is to …
- Heedful of Ruts in the Mind… conviction, persistence—persistence is right effort—right mindfulness, right concentration, and the discernment of right view and right resolve. Everything good comes out of heedfulness. So always keep that quality uppermost in your mind.
- Conviction & Persistence… qualities of persistence, ardency, mindfulness, alertness. It’s by staying consistently with the breath in all the ups and downs of our lives that we learn some important things about the mind at the same time that we’re developing those good qualities. This is why it’s not a matter of just watching the breath for a while and then wandering off and …
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