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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ayya Khema
Started reading
May 17, 2018
equanimity derives from the insight that everything constantly changes: whether what has happened feels good or bad is neither a cause for elation nor for depression. It’s just happening. We are here as this specific human being for maybe sixty, seventy, eighty years. So what’s all the hustle and bustle about? What is there to gain? Where is there to go? It’s all just happening.
The enjoyment of the senses becomes more refined when there’s more purification in a person. The smallest thing can be enjoyed, but the danger lies in wanting it. This wanting — the craving — brings the unsatisfactoriness because the wanting can never be fully satisfied.
The hope and anticipation of the gratification of sensual desire is that which makes it pleasurable. Once it has been gratified, it’s already finished and done with and a new desire arises.
Not everybody starts to inflict pain on others: some inflict pain on themselves. They swallow their anger and suppress it, and it seethes inside. All that resentment, worry, and anger shows itself in physical ailments, lack of energy, depression, negative reactions, a lack of enjoyment, and happiness.
compared anger with picking up hot coals with one’s bare hands and trying to throw them at the person with whom one is angry. Who gets burned first? The one who is angry of course.
Energy arises when one has a clearcut direction.
To use one’s strength and direction just for survival is not a fruitful undertaking, and real energy will not arise.
That’s why people who do jobs involving only mental activity are as tired or more so than people who plant trees or build roads.
Unless we live in each moment we are missing life. When we think about the past and worry about the future, we aren’t living. We are remembering and projecting. That’s not living. Life cannot be thought about, it has to be experienced.
“I am the owner of my kamma” means. It’s the one thing we own. Everything else is on loan. We can take nothing with us except that. Everything else goes to our heirs, those who come after us. Kamma is ours.
If an unskillful thought arises one should be careful to refrain from letting it turn into speech or action.
If we want to help someone who is dying, we could talk to them about their good deeds.
being satisfied with little, and not always trying to have the best. There’s usually something better yet available. There’s always a bigger television set, a larger refrigerator, a newer car, and a bigger house, not to mention all the other possibilities. There’s no end to them. To use our life to attain them is a waste of time, a waste of a good human life.
Frugality means that we can be satisfied with as little as possible, not trying for as much as possible.
If we can think in terms of universality rather than of one’s own two children at home, then we can expand to the extent where our lovingness reaches out to many.
we so easily make them our goal and direction; we try to get more and more of them or to keep them, try to make them permanent, not to lose them.
the purification of the heart so that it contains only lovingness and compassion. Both lovingness and compassion are qualities of the heart, just as intelligence is a quality of the mind, and they can be cultivated. When that has been done, happiness is one’s own.
A truly happy person is someone who is joyfully independent of outer conditions.
one has to let go of some of one’s ego-supports and most of one’s desires.
Without renunciation, life is a constant striving for something. Renunciation is the answer to all kinds of achievement syndromes, not just in the material world, but even in the spiritual world. Trying to achieve something in the spiritual world is just as foolish as trying to achieve something in the material world. There’s nothing to achieve. There’s only letting go. As we let go, more and more, of ego identifications, desires, and support systems, bliss will arise.
Insight, in Buddhist terminology, is always directed toward impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and nonself, either one of the three or all three.
Insight into the constant flux and flow of all phenomena, including ourselves, brings the understanding that there’s nothing in this world worth keeping, worth holding on to.
When one sees constant change in everything, so that one can never really say, “I am this,” then a first breakthrough into depth perception happens. Which one am I?
There isn’t a single “me” nor a single “you.” Nothing — just manifestations that are constantly changing. Even the universe is constantly changing, contracting and expanding. And so are we.
The mind that doesn’t need any outer conditions for happiness is the mind that can say, “This is the release from all suffering. This is true happiness.” Such a mind sees with clarity the absolute reality of what’s happening in this universe and doesn’t have to hang on to anything, attach to anything, doesn’t have to become anything, doesn’t have to be anything. It just does what is necessary at each particular moment and then lets go.
Mindfulness, which puts full attention on the movements and the characteristics of the body, can eventually see with clarity that the body is nothing but a conglomeration of parts that happen to be working in some manner and fashion as long as there’s life.
to let our bodies dictate our lives is futile, because the body will never be satisfied.
The ego likes to be entertained and reaffirmed constantly.
Renunciation is part of any spiritual path. It means letting go of our idea of who we are, or what we want to become, or what we want to have. These are ego identifications that constantly reaffirm “me,” and are going in the wrong direction. What we think we own — “my” house, “my” furniture, “my” husband, “my” wife, “my” children, “my” relatives, “my” car, “my” job, “my” office, “my” friends — makes the “me” feel more secure because it constitutes a support system. It gives the ego an illusory stability. None of the people or possessions are permanent though; all are constantly on the verge of
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If there were reality to this stability then the bigger the house or the car, the more friends or children, the more wives or husbands, the more secure one would be. Yet, having all these people and things just brings more worries and problems.
When we come to the end of life we have to renounce everything. We can’t take with us any of the possessions or people we call mine, we can’t even take with us the body we call mine. We might as well learn something about death before it comes. This is why the death moment is so often a struggle. Some people die peacefully, but many do not because they’re not ready to renounce everything. Previously they hadn’t given this any thought.
love without attachment is the only kind of love that has no fear in it and is therefore pure.
Real love is love without clinging, it’s giving without expectation, it’s standing next to rather than leaning on.
The patient person is one who can see the overall event, that things change, move, and flow. What seems so terrible today may seem quite all right tomorrow or next month or next year. What was so urgently required and needed a year ago makes absolutely no difference today.
It takes some wisdom to find out what is wrong with oneself, instead of what is wrong with everybody else.
Searching for truth is a good thing and young people should inquire and older people should never stop.
We live in a society of instant results. Press a button, and your whole shopping list is added up. Press another button, the fan goes on and cools the air. Press another button and the light goes off or on. Everything is instant. Our society, more so than ever before, expects immediate results. That is why pain killers are far more popular than herbal remedies, which take much longer to be effective.
When we see this with clarity, then the determination arises to make spiritual progress our priority. We need not live in a monastery or a cave for that. We can make progress or backslide anywhere. Whatever happens is used as a teaching aid, whether it is sickness or death, whether it is ill will or the loss of possessions, physical discomfort and pain or love and fame. Attachment to other people and worry about them are a teaching aid. Take nothing for granted, but use everything in order
We have three cravings and all others are connected with them. These three are craving for existence, craving for self-annihilation, and craving for sensual gratification.
The way out leads inward. If we check, we can’t find anything outside ourselves. Most people look for a solution out there somewhere, through better conditions, nicer people, less work, a little less suffering. If we can really see the futility of that, we won’t look out there anymore. Instead we’ll look inside, and that will eventually lead to the third noble truth, the cessation of suffering, which is liberation.
Don’t believe something because it’s a tradition, or because everybody around you does it, or because it’s written in a book, but only, the Buddha said, if you have inquired into it and found it to be useful and true.
Any abuse, anger, or threat belongs to the one who is uttering it. We don’t have to accept it.
Right action can be done under any circumstances by anyone at any time, be it in the household or at work or in a monastic situation.
Wherever, whoever we are, all of us are performing some actions. We can check, whether they are beneficial for others and for ourselves.
label your thoughts when they arise in meditation practice.
Wholesome thoughts, continually kept and never deviated from, will result in peace and quiet in the mind.
“Not to let an unwholesome thought arise that has not yet arisen. Not to let it continue when it has arisen. To make a wholesome thought arise which has not yet arisen. To make a wholesome thought continue which has already arisen.”
Right effort has to be steady.
arahant has constant right view and right intention. There can be no wrong
shaping the character of beings, and thereby their destiny. The term
