You will have problems in meditation. Everybody does. You can treat them as terrible torments or as challenges to be overcome. If you regard them as burdens, your suffering will only increase. If you...
When you finally overcome the five hindrances, you experience a great relief. This relief slowly increases until it culminates in piti, joy. This joy is purely internal. It does not arise dependent on...
We usually do not look into what is actually there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for reality. We get so caught up in this e...
We can’t examine our own depression without accepting it fully. The same is true for irritation and agitation, frustration, and all those other uncomfortable emotional states. You can’t examine someth...
Vipassana, by definition, is the cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. If you find that you are becoming unconscious in meditation, then you aren’t meditating, according to the definition of that w...
Vipassana meditation is a process by which that concept is dissolved. Little by little, you chip away at it, just by observing it.
The way to deal with danger is to know approximately how much of it there is, where it is likely to be found, and how to deal with it when it arises.
The way out of a trap is to study the trap itself, learn how it is built.
The roots of suffering are within us. And the method for eliminating suffering is within us as well.
The reason we are all stuck in life’s mud is that we ceaselessly run from our problems and after our desires. Meditation provides us with a laboratory situation in which we can examine this syndrome a...
The mind does not stay all the time with the feeling of breath. It goes to sounds, memories, emotions, perceptions, consciousness, and mental formations as well. When we experience these states, we sh...
Remember, jhana happens when it happens. It cannot be forced or rushed. Every apparent failure is a step toward success. When it doesn’t happen as you want it to, use mindfulness to notice the feeling...
Place no head above your own. By this he meant, don’t just accept somebody else’s word. See for yourself.
Pain is inevitable, suffering is not. Pain and suffering are two different animals.
Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your th...
In the practice of meditation you become sensitive to the actual experience of living, to how things actually feel. You do not sit around developing sublime thoughts about living. You live. Vipassana...
Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not lead to liberation.
If you are miserable you are miserable; that is the reality,
Every evil deed, every example of heartlessness in the world, stems directly from this false sense of me as distinct from everything else.
Concentration is the lens. It produces the burning intensity necessary to see into the deeper reaches of the mind. Mindfulness selects the object hat the lens will focus on and looks through the lens...