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Friday 30 August 2019

A PERSON OF NO INTEGRITY


"There's a really fine passage where the Buddha talks about the practice of a person of integrity as opposed to the practice of a person of no integrity. The person of no integrity is constantly comparing himself with other people. If his virtues are better than others, he exalts himself over that. If he lives in the forest, whatever his ascetic practice, he exalts himself over that.
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That's what it means to be a person of no integrity. You can do the things. You can do the practices. You could even get in the very high stages of jhana and yet still be a person of no integrity because you're constantly building a sense of self-righteousness that you use as a bludgeon against other people. Or even if you just think it—"I'm better than those people"—there! You've missed the whole point.
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As the Buddha says, the person of integrity is one who realizes that even if you’ve attained something like this, as soon as you start building an identity around it to compare yourself with other people, the basis has already changed. Build a basis around a nice state of concentration and start getting proud of it? The concentration’s gone; the value of that practice is gone.
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So you have to be very careful. You have to learn how not to create a sense of self, of your identity around these things. That’s how you get to the other shore. There can be a provisional sense of self as you gain the pride and satisfaction that comes from just mastering things—you’re able to do something you couldn’t do before—but when you start comparing yourself to other people, that’s when it gets bad. So watch out for that flood…”
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Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Excerpt from Murderers, Vipers, & Floods, Oh My!”
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You can read the complete talk here:

https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/Meditations7/Section0046.html



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