Tackling its program

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Ajahn Sucitto, Buddha

I find myself more and more teaching what seems most essential; to help people access intelligent and comfortable awareness. If this awareness becomes a steady orientation, it’s possible to live and grow in this personal world; here is a sense of safety with its fundamental goodwill. The tricky detail being that it is not personal; it’s before the personal conditions arise.

And this means that the sources of the programs and attitudes that become a person get revealed: dis-ease, restlessness and having to do something, or feeling guilty and inadequate that one isn’t doing (or in fact being) whatever it is that one should be – while not knowing what that is. Not that any of that is your fault. Essentially this dukkha (suffering) is not personal, not specific; and it isn’t resolved by doing anything other than tackling its program. It’s non-specific because its source is the pressurised space of one’s unsettled awareness. That then colours everything that the personality forms out of.

– Ajahn Sucitto

Where your Dhamma really comes alive

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Ajahn Sucitto, Buddha

reforming, where you form your life; perhaps larger, wider, more fearless, more touched by the presence of the sacred, which is what it’s all about.

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If you are quiet enough,

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Ajahn Sucitto, Buddha, Free e-books

A gift of Dhamma: Meditation, A Way of Awakening, by Ajahn Sucitto

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to rest in this mind of vastness

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Ajahn Sucitto, Buddha, Free e-books

A gift of Dhamma:

Meditation, A Way of Awakening, by Ajahn Sucitto

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Otherness?

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Ajahn Sucitto

When we consider otherness –the way beings
are different from us– we can feel either insecurity,
“How does she compare with me?”; or contempt,
“You’re not as good as me”; or fear and intimidation,
“You’re better or stronger than me”. Or we can feel
adoration/attraction, “I want to be bonded to you”.

These immediate assumptions are called “conceit”:
that is, we conceive of people as worse, better
or the same as us. The effect is that the mind’s
responsiveness gets stuck. Caught in the conceit
of self-view, the heart doesn’t extend its boundaries
of appreciation and concern. We take each other
for granted as “my wife”, “my boss”, “my teacher”.

And that fixing of them, freezes our sensitivity.
In that state, the heart easily tips over into
complaining about the other not being the way
they “should be” (or rather the way I want them to be),
and so the heart becomes a breeding ground for ill-will.

Ajahn Sucitto, Parami: Ways to Cross Life’s Floods

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