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+ | ====== The Road to Nirvana Is Paved with Skillful Intentions ====== | ||
+ | <span hide>The Road to Nirvana Is Paved with Skillful Intentions</ | ||
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+ | Summary: | ||
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+ | One of the Buddha' | ||
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+ | If we were to sketch this state of affairs, the picture would look something like this: The straight road to hell is paved with bad intentions, some of which may look good to a casual glance. Roads paved with good intentions, leading to heavens of pleasure — some of them quite skillful — branch off on either side of the way, but all too often they get lost in an underbrush of unskillfulness and we find ourselves back on the road to hell. The Buddha' | ||
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+ | The most basic step in this process is to make sure that we stay off the road to hell. We do this through the practice of generosity and virtue, consciously replacing unskillful intentions with more skillful ones. We then refine our intentions even further through meditation, digging up the roots of greed, aversion, and delusion to prevent them from influencing the choices shaping our lives. Greed and anger are sometimes easy to detect, but delusion — by its very nature — is obscure. When we're deluded, we don't //know// we're deluded. That's why meditation has to focus on strengthening and quickening our powers of mindfulness and alertness: so that we can catch sight of delusion and uproot it before it takes over our minds. | ||
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+ | The Buddha' | ||
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+ | In essence, the Buddha told Rahula to use his actions as a mirror for reflecting the quality of his mind. Each time before he acted — and here " | ||
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+ | From this we can see that the essential approach for uncovering delusion is the familiar principle of learning from our own mistakes. The way the Buddha formulates this principle, though, has important implications, | ||
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+ | As children we learn to be dishonest about our intentions simply as a matter of survival: "I didn't mean to do it," "I couldn' | ||
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+ | A similar dynamic surrounds our reactions to the consequences of our actions. We start learning denial at an early age — "It wasn't my fault," | ||
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+ | As the Buddha points out, the end of suffering requires that we abandon craving and ignorance, but if we can't be honest with ourselves about our intentions, how can we perceive craving in time to abandon it? If we can't face up to the principle of cause and effect in our actions, how will we ever overcome ignorance? Ignorance is caused less by a lack of information than by a lack of self-awareness and self-honesty. To understand the noble truths requires that we be truthful with ourselves in precisely the areas where self-honesty is most difficult. | ||
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+ | It also requires maturity. As we examine our intentions, we need to learn how to say no to unskillful motives in a way that's firm enough to keep them in check but not so firm that it drives them underground into subconscious repression. We can learn to see the mind as a committee: the fact that unworthy impulses are proposed by members of the committee doesn' | ||
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+ | At the same time, we should be adult enough to admit that our habitual or spontaneous impulses are not always trustworthy — first thought is not always best thought — and that what we feel like doing now may not give results that will be pleasant to feel at a later date. As the Buddha said, there are four courses of action that may be open to us at any particular time: one that we want to do and will give good results; one that we don't want to do and will give bad results; one that we want to do but will give bad results; and one that we don't want to do but will give good results. The first two are no-brainers. We don't need much intelligence to do the first and avoid the second. The measure of our true intelligence lies in how we handle the last two choices. | ||
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+ | Examining the results of our actions requires maturity as well: a mature realization that self-esteem can't be based on always being right, and that there' | ||
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+ | At first glance, we might think that continual self-reflection of this sort would add further complications to our lives when they already seem more than complicated enough, but in fact the Buddha' | ||
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+ | The emphasis on the intentions behind our actions and their resulting consequences also carries over from daily life onto the meditation seat, providing our meditation with the proper focus. In examining our actions in terms of cause and effect, skillful and unskillful, we are already beginning to look at experience in line with the two sets of variables that make up the four noble truths: the origination of stress (unskillful cause), the path to the cessation of stress (skillful cause), stress (unskillful effect), and the cessation of stress (skillful effect). The way the Buddha recommended that Rahula judge the results of his actions — both while doing them and after they are done — echoes the insight that formed the heart of his Awakening: that intentions have results both in the immediate present and over time. | ||
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+ | When we look at the present moment from this perspective, | ||
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+ | As we work at developing our intentions to even higher levels of skill, we find that the most consummate intentions are those that center the mind securely in a clear awareness of the present. As we use them to become more and more familiar with the present, we come to see that //all// present intentions, no matter how skillful, are inherently burdensome. The only way out of this burden is to allow the unraveling of the intentions that provide the weave for our present experience. This provides an opening to the dimension of unlimited freedom that lies beyond them. That's how skillful intentions pave the road all the way to the edge of nirvana. And from there, the path — "like that of birds through space" — can't be traced. | ||
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