Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

by Daniel M. Ingram

We have faith that training in morality is a good idea and that we can do it, so we exert energy to live up to a standard of clear and skillful living. We realize that we must pay attention to our thoughts, words, and deeds in order to do this, so we try to be mindful of them. We realize that we often fail to pay attention, so we try to increase our ability to concentrate on how we live our life. In this way, through experience, we become wiser in a relative sense, learning how to live a good and useful life. Seeing our skill improve and the benefits it has for our life, we generate more faith, and so on. With respect to training in concentration, we may have faith that we might be able to attain high states of consciousness, so we sit down on a cushion and energetically try to stabilize our attention and tune in to skillful qualities. We realize that we cannot stabilize our attention without mindfulness of our object and of the qualities of the state we wish attain. We develop strong concentration by consistently stabilizing our attention. We attain high states of concentration and thus gain a direct understanding of how to navigate in that territory and the meaning and purpose of doing so. Our success creates more faith, and so we apply energy to further develop our concentration abilities. With the faith borne of the experience yielded by strong concentration, we begin to think it might be possible to awaken, so we energetically explore all the sensations that make up o...