The Buddha cannot do it for you

"The Buddha cannot do it for you. The Noble Disciples cannot do it for you. They can only tell you what to do, but it is you who will have to do it yourself and you are left with less time with each passing day.”

When you have this constant mindfulness, when you sit in meditation, your mind can enter into jhāna. When you enter jhāna and then come out of jhāna, when your mind starts to have desire, you will see the suffering that arises and then you will know that your suffering is caused by your desire.

All you have to do is to resist following your desire. When you do that, your suffering will disappear. From then onwards, you will always look inside your mind, attentively noticing your desire, because you know that your suffering or bad feelings all arise from your desire.

And if you constantly watch, you will then prevent other desires from arising until there is no more desire left in your mind. Then you have achieved the final stage of enlightenment. You have reached Nibbāna: that state of mind where there are no longer desires left in the mind. We call this purity of mind. Desire makes us impure, makes us sad and unhappy. When we get rid of desire, the mind will always remain blissful, happy. So this is what you have to do.

The Buddha cannot do it for you. The Noble Disciples cannot do it for you. They can only tell you what to do, but it is you who will have to do it yourself and you are left with less time with each passing day. Your life is like a lit candle. Once the candle is lit, it will slowly burn itself up, and eventually there will be no candle left. Likewise, your life is moving to the end, and there is nothing that you can do to stop its inevitable course.

So you should take advantage of the time that you still have left and try to develop the magga, the path to enlightenment. Nothing else in this world can help you eliminate your mental suffering; it is the only path to enlightenment that will be able to help you. No one can develop this path but you. So it is up to you what you want to do with your life.

Do you want to waste your life by doing what your desires tell you to do? Look at what has happened; you have been doing this for the past how many years from the time you were born until now? What have you got from following your desires? Have you ever eliminated your suffering? Have you ever experienced any blissful feeling or any feeling of contentment? You should be smart enough to know that what you have been doing was the wrong path, not the path that you should pursue.

You should pursue the path that the Buddha and his Noble Disciples pursued because they have already told us that this is the path to the cessation of suffering. This is the path to permanent happiness, to the supreme happiness, called Paramaṁ sukkhaṁ.

By Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto