How Much Effort Does It Take to Get Free? with Noah Levine

June 28, 2021 How Much Effort Does It Take to Get Free?

Effort & Wise Interventions

Two levels of effort:

One is that big lifetime daily effort. How much are we sitting? Ethics? Precepts? Are we going to go on retreats? Are we making that a regular part of our schedule? A priority of our life?

Then, there's the moment-to-moment effort to overcome the suffering that your mind is creating against your will - the untrained monkey mind - which is gonna get in some fights in your mind, gonna get in some fantasies in your mind, and it's gonna watch some *********** and it’s gonna have some resentments. You know, the untrained mind that's just gonna do whatever it feels like without your volitional involvement, without your consent, your mind is just gonna create suffering for you.

Now that's the good news and the bad news.

Good news is that it's not actually your fault. The fact that you suffer isn't your fault. It's just what it's like to be a human being. All of us have minds that are fueled by craving and aversion and self-centeredness.

But without training - without effort - it's hopeless. There's not even a possibility of true happiness.

So the bad news is that you’re 100% responsible to do something about if you want to stop suffering. You've got to do all of the work yourself. There's no grace of a guru. There's no divine intervention. There's no magic pill to pop you out of the matrix. The ayahuasca doesn't work. The LSD doesn't work. None of that **** works. It's all dead ends Only training your mind through your own effort will lead to a reliable transformation.

So the Buddha says if you're down, if you really want to do this, you’ve gotta do all of the work yourself.

It's one of the things I love about the original teachings of the Buddha. He would say, “here's the four efforts to train your mind … and here's the way to do it”.

But you've got to do all of the work yourself.