The Quotable Thanissaro

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dhammapal
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Question: To me, I think the major attraction or allure of anger is the feeling of energy and power that comes with it. It’s often seemed to me, in the times I’ve actually been able to look at it, that if there were some way to separate the energetic component from the negative emotional aspect of it, it would be really marvelous. Because there is, simply, a force to it that is so much more powerful than feelings like goodwill — the kinder sort of emotions that come up. But that remains for me as just this idea, that it would be great to find out a way of doing this. I must admit I don’t have the faintest idea of how to begin.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Well, can you think of holding on to that energy for twenty minutes? Of how it would feel? You’d be exhausted. So basically, you’re really draining yourself by letting that energy come through. It’s not that pleasant. If you actually looked at it from a more detached point of view, you’d realize that — while there is a certain thrill to getting that rush of blood right through the system — you couldn’t sustain it for very long.

Question: It does bring a sort of mental clarity. Or, at least, things seem to be very clear.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: That’s the problem. That’s the tunnel. You’re in a complicated situation, and all of a sudden all you see is one little detail, and you see it very clearly. I have to admit, before I was a monk, I smoked pot. And I inhaled... Before becoming a meditator, I had always thought that pot gave great clarity. You saw certain things really, really clearly. But then, after I started meditating, I was visiting someone and he offered me a little. I said to myself, “Well, let’s see what this is like, and why this is against one of the precepts.” I came to realize that that clarity was precisely this issue: that so many parts of your mind just get shut down, and you’re focused on one thing. But everything else was in a haze. So it’s the clarity of an amoeba. Amoebas see one thing very clearly: where the food is. They have a lot of energy devoted to their food. So that’s a lot of the appeal of anger: It seems clear; it seems to be very energetic, but when you open up your brain a little bit, you realize it’s a very narrow, distorted perception, and the energy is really a drain.

From: Antidotes to Anger by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
You realize that if your happiness depends on other people’s suffering, they’re not going to stand for it. You can’t say, “Excuse me, this is my happiness, and so you’ll just have to let me continue enjoying it because it’s so special.” They’ll say, “This is my suffering. It’s special, too. I don’t want it.” This is an equalizer in that it makes you realize that your happiness forces you to take other people’s happiness into account.

From: Bodies & Minds Outside by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
When you take the long, long view like this, it makes a lot of your problems in your present lifetime seem pretty small. It helps give you some equanimity, gives you some patience. Because there are a lot of things in life that, if you thought, “This is your one lifetime, this is your one chance,” would strike you as very unfair. It would be hard to live with the idea that, say, someone smeared your name and you couldn’t get it un-smeared. Other people who don’t seem to have any right to power have taken over a lot of power. But if you take the long view of things, you realize that this is going to pass, and this is not your only chance. It makes it a lot easier to live with the things you can’t change, and focus on the ones you can.

From: Patience & Hope by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
You hear there are types of meditation where they allow the mind simply to wander around, and all you have to do is follow its wanderings. Sounds good, the mind is free to go wherever it wants, but it doesn’t develop any real strength. So you have to let go of its wanderings, resist its wanderings. There are things you’ve got to let go.

From: One Thing Clear Through by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
As [the Buddha] noted, you can’t see all the results of actions here in this lifetime. Some people say, “Everything I’ve seen in life is enough to convince me that kamma works.” Well, No, it’s not. There are plenty of people who do all kinds of horrible unskillful things, yet they’re still alive. They thrive. The Buddha has a long list of people who thrive because they kill, steal, engage in illicit sex, lie, or take intoxicants [Saṁyutta Nikāya 42:13]. They do it with the right people and they do it in the right way to please someone in power, so they actually get rewarded by society in one way or another. But as the Buddha commented, those are only the short-term consequences. You’ve got to take the long-term consequences into consideration as well.

From: Rebirth is Relevant by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
There’s a passage where Ajaan Maha Boowa says, “When you live with the truth, there’s nothing to fear.” The truth has nothing to serve up but more truth. It’s when you’ve living with fictions — with a lot of make-believe in the mind — that you feel threatened by the truth. When you try to pretend that there’s nothing unskillful in the mind at all, that all of your intentions are good — or that the unskillful ones will go away with some magical practice — then the truth is threatening, and you build up all kinds of walls around it. But it keeps breaking through those walls. And you put up more walls. You spend a lot of energy repairing the walls, filling in the cracks. And yet greed, anger, and delusion, all the unskillful emotions, manage to break through the walls, to seep through the cracks. Like tree roots, they work their way through the walls, and then bring them down — these roots of what’s unskillful in the mind.

So rather than expending a lot of energy in a useless way, try to devote your energy to building something that’s really true. Don’t build walls. Build virtues. Build concentration.

It’s interesting that of all the virtues, the Buddha makes truth the most important. Truth is not just a quality of accurate statements; it’s also a quality of the mind. In fact, if you want to find the truth, you have to develop this quality of truthfulness: the willingness to look at what’s there, admit what’s there — so that you can work with it.

From: Fear of the Truth by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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dhammapal wrote: Sun Jul 10, 2022 1:34 am
Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
There’s a passage where Ajaan Maha Boowa says, “When you live with the truth, there’s nothing to fear.” The truth has nothing to serve up but more truth. It’s when you’ve living with fictions — with a lot of make-believe in the mind — that you feel threatened by the truth. When you try to pretend that there’s nothing unskillful in the mind at all, that all of your intentions are good — or that the unskillful ones will go away with some magical practice — then the truth is threatening, and you build up all kinds of walls around it. But it keeps breaking through those walls. And you put up more walls. You spend a lot of energy repairing the walls, filling in the cracks. And yet greed, anger, and delusion, all the unskillful emotions, manage to break through the walls, to seep through the cracks. Like tree roots, they work their way through the walls, and then bring them down — these roots of what’s unskillful in the mind.

So rather than expending a lot of energy in a useless way, try to devote your energy to building something that’s really true. Don’t build walls. Build virtues. Build concentration.

It’s interesting that of all the virtues, the Buddha makes truth the most important. Truth is not just a quality of accurate statements; it’s also a quality of the mind. In fact, if you want to find the truth, you have to develop this quality of truthfulness: the willingness to look at what’s there, admit what’s there — so that you can work with it.

From: Fear of the Truth by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
We can’t wait until the world gets straightened out before we straighten out our own minds, because the cause is in the mind. The world out there is the realm of effects. The realm of causes is in here: That’s one of the basic lessons of dependent co-arising. All the causes of suffering come prior to your engagement with the world. If you want other people to change their behavior, you’ve got to straighten out your behavior. You have to walk your talk, so that your talk is compelling. You can’t force other people to follow your example, but at least you establish that example here in the world. It’s good to have these examples in the world. Otherwise the world would be a totally depressing place.

From: True Protection for the World by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
So goodwill [mettā] for yourself means not harming others. And then you start thinking about them. They want happiness too, just like you. It’s just that we live in this world where people have lots of different levels of understanding and levels of behavior, and you have to be forgiving. So when anger comes up, you’ve got a tool to deal with it.

From: Guardian Meditations by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
When you decide that you don’t agree with society’s values, learn to do it in a way that’s not confrontational. After all, you’re going your own way. You’re not a permanent earthling. You’re not here to settle down for good. You’re here primarily to practice, to train your mind.

From: An Anthropologist from Mars by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Exercising the mind is the opposite of exercising the body. Exercising the body, you’ve got to move it around a lot. But with the mind, you exercise it by making it stay with one thing and then bringing all your powers of mindfulness and alertness to bear on keeping it with that one thing, keeping it still, so that it can gain a sense of well-being inside.

From: Exercising Singleness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Remember, we’re not here in a place where we’re trying to establish a just or paradisiacal society, or even a fair society. We’re entangled in a bad process, and the wisest, most compassionate thing is to get out and to show other people that they can get out, too. You have to realize that you’re not the only person who’s been involved in this kind of behavior. Everybody has been involved in a back and forth to some extent — if not precisely the way you’ve been involved, they’ve got their own involvements.

From: The Samsaric Mud Fight by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
The teachings themselves are meant to function as skillful thoughts toward the goal of Awakening. The Buddha was very clear on the point that he did not mean for his teachings to become a metaphysical system or for them to be adhered to simply for the sake of their truth value. He discussed metaphysical topics only when they could play a role in skillful behavior. Many metaphysical questions — such as whether or not there is a soul or self, whether or not the world is eternal, whether or not it is infinite, etc. — he refused to answer, on the grounds that they were either counterproductive or irrelevant to the task at hand: that of gaining escape from the stress and suffering inherent in time and the present.

From: The Wings to Awakening by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
Sometimes you hear that insight is seeing things in terms of the three characteristics. But then the three characteristics or, more properly, the three perceptions: What are they good for? If you simply say, “Well, everything is impermanent,” what does that tell you about what to do? You could take that observation and do all kinds of things with it. You could decide that nothing is worth striving for at all, so you might as well give up. In other words, that insight on its own can be used for very defeatist purposes. Or you could use it for hedonistic purposes, to justify going for whatever pleasure is within your reach while it lasts.

Actually, you use these perceptions properly when you put them in the context of the four noble truths, or more specifically in the context of the analysis the Buddha recommends for gaining escape from the forms of suffering included in the first noble truth. You see their origination, you see their passing away, you see their allure, and then you see their drawbacks. It’s in the context of trying to see their drawbacks that you apply those three perceptions: You look to see the extent to which the things you cling to are inconstant, stressful, and not-self so that you can develop dispassion for them. That dispassion is going to be your escape to the deathless.

From: The Meaning of Insight by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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Re: The Quotable Thanissaro

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote:
If you really feel goodwill [mettā] for all, there’s no way you can intentionally harm them. You don’t have to like all beings; you simply decide that you don’t want to cause them suffering. You don’t want to take pleasure in their suffering.

As you think about it, what good do you get out of other people’s suffering? You don’t gain anything at all. There may be a sense of schadenfreude, but that’s pretty miserable food for the mind. It’s better to realize that if all the cruel and heartless people in the world had a true sense of happiness, they wouldn’t do cruel and heartless things anymore. So the desire for goodwill sets your attitude straight on how the world would actually become a better place for everyone: You’re wishing that people would understand how to be truly happy, so that they’d stop doing cruel and heartless things. Goodwill also puts you in a position where your true happiness doesn’t have to conflict with the true happiness of other people.

From: Fear of Death by Thanissaro Bhikkhu
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