Search results for: "Persistence"
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- Remarkable Qualities… So once you see that this is a worthwhile activity, the next step is to be persistent, really sticking with it. Stay with the breath every time it comes in, every time it goes out. If you find yourself wandering off, just bring yourself right back. Don’t let yourself get discouraged. The longer you can stay with the breath, and the more continuous …
- Mindfulness: Get with the Program… The program, of course, is right effort, or the strength of persistence: preventing unskillful qualities from arising, or if they do arise, learning how to abandon them; trying to give rise to skillful qualities, and once they’re there, trying to develop them as far as you can. We’re not here simply to sit on the deck of the steamboat, watching the riverside …
- Meaning in a Meaningless Universe… There’s generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, and equanimity. These are the qualities that the tradition has said lead to awakening. It’s not a list you’ll find in anything attributed to the Buddha directly. It comes from the Jataka tales, which were later compilations. But they’re all qualities that the Buddha himself, at one point or another …
- A Path of Skills… One is persistence, when you really try to do it well. The other is intentness: You really focus your full attention on what you’re doing. So, try to do this well and give it your full attention. We go through life knowing that we’re breathing, but for the most part we don’t pay much attention to it. As a result, we …
- You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening… The persistence of right effort is not always a matter of just watching things. There are some unskillful states of mind that cause suffering which, when you watch them, just go away on their own. They wither away in front of your sustained awareness. The fact that they’ve been causing suffering in the mind is simply because you haven’t been paying them …
- Food for the Mind… Then there’s persistence. You stick with that conviction. You realize that the law of karma is not something that operates like traffic laws, say, only on Thursday afternoons or only on Saturday afternoons, on one side of the street. It’s everywhere, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. So you stick with that conviction at all times. And in doing …
- A Warrior’s Strengths… In this case, the Buddha is referring to all the five faculties, all the five strengths that you need in your meditation—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration and discernment. Your persistence, your energy, the amount of effort you can put into the practice, is the first string you tune. In other words, you look at what your strength is, what can you handle, which is …
- Wisdom Through Doing… The second is persistence. You stick with it. Once you’ve decided that this is the right course you want to follow, you actually put forth the effort. As when you’re meditating here right now: Anything unskillful comes up in the mind, you want to let it go. You should focus on the breath. Anything that’s not related to the mind and …
- Bases for Success… There’s the base of success which is concentration founded on persistence and the fabrications of exertion. The fabrication of exertion is there in each case; it basically means right effort. The other two bases are concentration founded on intent and concentration founded on circumspection. That makes it sound like there are four different kinds of concentration. But in each case, you’ve got …
- The Buddha’s Eight Principles… But that would go against the principle of persistence, which is that if there’s something unskillful in the mind, you’ve got to get rid of it. If something skillful is not there yet, you do your best to give rise to it. But remember, contentment is just about material things. Discontent has to do with the realization that there’s still more …
- A Good Purpose in Life… generosity, virtue, renunciation, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, and equanimity. In our practice, we have to develop all of these qualities and we have to see the opportunity to develop them as something really precious. There was one time when Ajaan Fuang was going to lead a group of his students up to the chedi at the monastery in order to meditate. The chedi …
- A Position of Strength… Then you need persistence or effort. This has to build on conviction, because you might find yourself getting more and more tired when the days are long or your body’s not feeling strong. On those days, it’s very easy to give up and say, “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to care about that anymore.” Of course, there are …
- Licking Yourself Clean… Then there has to be persistence. You stick with the practice. Try it again and again and again. But persistence is not just a matter of the hours you put in. You also have to be intent, to pay very careful attention to what you’re doing, what the results are. Finally, you need to use your intelligence, which means using ingenuity and being …
- Breathing Easy… Or if it’s persistent, you say, “Well, if it’s really persistent, I guess I’ve got to go with it.” But you don’t. You’ve got the right to choose, every time it comes up, to say No. That doesn’t mean it’s not going to come up again, but right now you say, “No. I don’t need to …
- Trust in Heedfulness… And as the Buddha says frequently, the various members of the list—starting with conviction on through persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—are developed through heedfulness. Now, this may seem a strange combination: Conviction, on the one hand, implies trust; and heedfulness implies wariness. But if you look carefully at what heedfulness means, it means that you believe that your actions do make a …
- Potentials for Awakening… This is how analysis of qualities moves into the next factor for awakening, which is persistence—in other words, right effort. When you see that there’s a quality that’s unskillful, you try to get rid of it. As for a quality that is skillful, if it’s not there, you try to encourage it; if it is there, you try to develop …
- Trading Up… But it takes persistence on your part, that you’re going to stick with this, stick with this, stick with this. And again, the pleasure of the concentration, when you get it, will help. A question always comes up: “How can I have more patience? Quickly, tell me now!” That’s impatience asking the question, and of course you can’t learn patience through …
- Mindfulness of Breathing: Four in One… mindfulness, analysis of qualities, and persistence, and they correspond to three factors of the path—right view, right effort, right mindfulness. These are the qualities the Buddha said circle around every factor of the path. So right now they’re circling around you, circling around your breath, around your body, around the feelings of pleasure that you can gain from the breath, and circling …
- Strength for Stillness… Then there’s the strength of persistence, which is a matter of coming back, coming back, coming back, figuring out how much energy you have to put into this right now, the kind of energy you can sustain. It takes a little while to get the right balance. The image the Buddha gives is the tuning of a lute. You try to tune the …
- Responsible for Your Actions… If you don’t believe that, then you don’t really care. “Why would I bother being responsible? Or responsible to the extent that I didn’t want to harm anybody at all?” Conviction is what gives you the strength to carry through with the persistence that’s needed to keep at this process of sorting through your thoughts, sorting through your attachments, and …
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