To not follow the dharma, either intentionally or through lack of awareness, creates a very low level of attention. In this low level of attention we make all kinds of mistakes and we are unhappy no matter what good fortune befalls us.
When you are not following dharma, then you will not be at peace. You will not be happy. The simplest things will seem to be endless obstacles.
Do not practice buddha-dharma with the thought that it is to benefit others.
Pride is a mental factor causing us to feel higher or superior to others. Even our study of dharma can be the occasion for the delusion of pride to arise if we think our understanding is superior to that of everyone else. Pride is harmful because it prevents us from accepting fresh knowledge from a qualified teacher. Just as a pool of water cannot collect on the tip of a mountain, so too a reservoir of understanding cannot be established in a mind falsely elevated by pride.
Too often in the west we fail to realize that even in eastern disciplines the spiritual life is not meant as an escape from the worldly life. There is karma to be fulfilled on earth, within the dharma of necessity.
There must be something here for me to get or to share or to do. So I have the duty that I do, the dharma that I do - which I love - with my teaching, with my family, my son, my students, my girlfriend.
I've shared meditation with a lot of hip-hop artists, inmates, and returning war veterans with PTSD, as well. I feel like this dharma, this service is part of my job.
Tibetans - at least traditionally - are so totally permeated with the dharma that they don't see any difference between dharma and everyday life, really. And therefore they enjoy it because they don't make a separation.
The very best players, when they are practicing, put everything they've got into it. But then they leave it for a while. And it's the same in dharma practice.
One has to find a balance. I don't say that when you leave it you forget all about the dharma or practice, but there have to be times when you throw yourself into it, and then there are times when you just relax and realize that wherever you go, you cannot get out of the dharma.
The Tibetans are good at learning many skillful ways to show that everything we do becomes dharma practice, depending on which kind of approach we use.
Why are we sitting? Why are we practicing? Why are we doing anything? It's not so I can be happy. It's so I can embody the dharma in order to benefit other beings.
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