Fear is a deep issue and a challenging one. Dealing with fear opens the door to new territory
and gives us the courage to jump over the edge. ~Ven. Ariya Nani
Generosity, virtue and meditation are the essences that we can extract from our life. ~Ven. Ariya Nani
The three trainings in virtue, concentration, and wisdom enable a practitioner to suppress
or abandon the different levels of defilements. But only the practice of vipassana meditation
is able to completely uproot them. ~Ven. Ariya Nani
When you try to get rid of fear or anger, what happens? You just get restless or discouraged and have to go eat something or smoke or drink or do something else. But if you wait and endure restlessness, greed, hatred, doubt, despair, and sleepiness, if you observe these conditions as they cease and end, you will attain a kind of calm and mental clarity, which you will never achieve if you’re always going after something else. ~Ajahn Sumedho
All kids need is a little help, a little hope and somebody who believes in them.
~Earvin Magic Johnson
The empty mind – the pure mind – is not a blank, zero-land, where you’re not feeling or caring
about anything. It’s an effulgence of the mind. It’s a brightness that is truly sensitive and accepting.
It’s an ability to accept life as it is. When we accept life as it is, we can respond appropriately
to the way we’re experiencing it, rather than just reacting out of fear and aversion.
~Ajahn Sumedho
“There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering.” ~Alan Watts
“ Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.” ~ Janet Fitch
Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally,
how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task
to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart,
conditions are always good enough. ~Ajahn Sumedho
Meditate bhikkhu! Don’t be heedless!
Don’t let pleasures whirl the mind!
Heedless, do not gulp a glob of iron!
Bewail not when burning, ‘This is dukkha’!
~Dhammapada
Explanation: O monk, meditate and do not be indolent. Do not allow your mind to loiter among sensual pleasures. If you allow it, it will be like having iron balls forced down your throat in hell. You will bewail your fate crying, “This is suffering,” Do not allow it to happen. Source: Buddhanet
You respect your mind, so you are more careful what you put in it. If you have a nice house, you don’t go out and pick up all the filth from the street and bring it in, you bring in things that will enhance it and make it a refreshing and delightful place.
If you are going to identify with anything, then don’t identify with mortal conditions. See what identification is – investigate your own mind to see clearly the nature of thought, of memory, of sense consciousness, and of feeling as impermanent conditions. Bring your awareness to the slower things, to the transiency of bodily sensation; investigate pain and see it as a moving energy, a changing condition. Emotionally, it seems permanent when you are in pain, but that is just an illusion of the emotions – let go of it all. Even if you have insight, even if you understand everything clearly – let go of the insight.
When the mind is empty, say ‘ Who is it that lets go?’ Ask the question, try to find out who it is, what it is that lets go. Bring up that not-knowing state with the word Who – ‘Who am I? Who lets go?’ A state of uncertainty arises; bring this up, allow it to be . . . and there is emptiness, voidness, the state of uncertainty when the mind just goes blank.
I keep stressing this right understanding, right attitude, right intention, more towards simplifying your life so that you aren’t involved in unskilful and complex activities. So that you don’t live heedlessly, exploiting others and having no respect for yourself or the people around you. Develop the Precepts as a standard, and develop nekkhamma – renunciation of that which is unskilful or unnecessary – and then mentally let go of greed, let go of hatred, let go of delusion. ~Ajahn Sumedho
Buddha-wisdom is just that much: knowing the conditioned as the conditioned, and the Unconditioned as the Unconditioned. Buddhas rest in the Unconditioned, and no longer, unless it’s necessary, seek absorption into anything. They are no longer deluded by any conditions, and they incline to the Unconditioned, the spaciousness, the emptiness, rather than towards the changing conditions within the space.
In your meditation now, as you incline towards the emptiness of the mind, towards the spaciousness of the mind, your habitual grasping, fascination, revulsions, fears, doubts and worries about the conditions lessen. You begin to recognise they’re just things that come and go: they’re not-self, nothing to get excited about or depressed about, they are as they are. We can allow conditions to be just as they are, because they come and go – their nature is to go away, so we don’t have to make them go away. We’re free and patient and enduring enough to allow things to take their natural course. In this way, we liberate ourselves from the struggle, strife, and the confusion of the ignorant mind that has to spend all its time evaluating and discriminating, trying to hold onto something, trying to get rid of something. ~Ajahn Sumedho
