The Teaching of Ajahn Suchart.
26 June 2024
Q: I tend to struggle with the balance between wanting to find peace & happiness and wanting to accomplish my own goals & be successful. The two seem to be at odd with each other and everything I learned seems to contradict itself. So how do I find the balance between the two?
Than Ajahn: Well, there is no balance between the two, really. It’s one or the other.
You can continue on with what you want to achieve but you just have to learn to know the limit of your ability.
You have to know how much you can do and what you cannot do then try to curb your ambition.
Try not to have ambition more than you can achieve then you won’t have much stress this way.
And if it’s possible, you should also provide some time for rest.
Like on your day off, you can go to a quiet retreat and calm your mind, rest your mind, do some meditation and do some reflection on the nature of life. It will then tamper your ambition and your desire to achieve so many things.
Because if you have time to reflect on life, you’ll find that life is impermanent, life is short, life is temporary.
We don’t live forever.
And when we go, we don’t take anything we’ve achieved with us. So once you see the real picture of life then your ambition might be curtailed or lessen.
And then you’ll find that what you really want to achieve is just to be able to exist/to survive then you’ll have more time for finding peace and happiness by practising meditation. P
Right now we forget that we only live here temporarily and there are so many things we want to achieve.
We forget that whatever we’ve achieved, when we die, we won’t take them with us. So what’s the point of trying to do so many things or achieve so many things when in the end we just don’t take them with us anyway?
What we take with us is what we’ve established in our mind. Peace or stress? So it’s better to spend more time to establish peace of mind and reduce the stress from being ambitious.
Then when we die, we take a peaceful mind with us rather than a stressful mind. Because the mind continues on, it will go to look for a new body and continue the ambition again.
So you need the wisdom of the Buddha to remind you that what you try to achieve is really useless to your mind, it can only create more stress for your mind. So eventually you’ll stop having ambition to whatever you want to achieve and you’ll find a new goal.
Your new goal is to achieve peace of mind all the time.
Like the Buddha. He was a prince and destined to be the emperor. But after he looked at the end point of life, ‘What’s the point?’ He’s going to get old, get sick and die and whatever he might had achieved wouldn’t mean anything to him anymore. So he looked at the other way. He looked at his mind/his heart/his spirit that it will continue on and so it’s better to do things for the mind than for the body.
So right now try to reduce your ambition.
Look at the nature of life, look at the impermanent of life then you can reduce your ambition and just do whatever it’s needed to do to survive.
Then you’ll have more time to devote to find peace of mind which is more important than to achieve your ambition. Because when your mind becomes peaceful, you’ll become happier than when you achieve something.
When you achieve something, you might be happy for a few days then you want to achieve more. But with peace of mind, you have contentment and you don’t need to achieve anything and you can be happy.
So study the Buddha’s teachings especially the meditation part, how to make your mind peaceful and happy.
“Dhamma in English, May 27, 2023.”
By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
YouTube: Dhamma in English.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi_BnRZmNgECsJGS31F495g
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