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It’s in this inner world where the Buddha talks about touching deathless with the body. This is what he means: The deathless is something that will appear in your inner world. There’s that possibility, too, right here.

"If you focus on the area inside, you don’t have to conflict with anybody. No one is going to move into your territory. No one can evict you and take over your place — except for the fact that the body will evict you from the body at some point. Otherwise, you’re in this world wherever it goes. It’s your territory. So you want to make sure that it’s in order, and it’s not creating a lot of suffering for itself. It’s in a world that has lots of potentials for suffering, but also potentials for happiness. It’s in this inner world where the Buddha talks about touching deathless with the body. This is what he means: The deathless is something that will appear in your inner world. There’s that possibility, too, right here. So try to stay as grounded as you can right here, as sensitive as you can — sensitive not only in sense of sensing what’s going on, but also in the sense of understanding. When something happens, if there’s any pain, any suffering: Why? What can be done about it? It’...
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That old saw about the path of the arahant being selfish: What’s selfish about a happiness that doesn’t deprive anybody of anything? People around you will pick up a sense of ease, a sense of peace, from the peace that you develop in your mind.

"That old saw about the path of the arahant being selfish: What’s selfish about a happiness that doesn’t deprive anybody of anything? If you could go out and concentrate people’s minds for them, that would be a noble activity, but you can’t. What you can do is get into a concentrated mind state yourself and be an example to other people. People around you will pick up a sense of ease, a sense of peace, from the peace that you develop in your mind, the sense of happiness that comes when you can stay longer and longer and longer in one place and realize that you don’t have to get pushed out. No matter what happens, no matter how loud the noises around you are, how insistent outside stimuli maybe, they don’t destroy the breath. They don’t destroy your ability to stay with the breath. This is a kind of happiness that comes with practice. So it’s worth working on. It’s a happiness that does withstand scrutiny. Yet even this is not the ultimate. It’s not the happiness the Buddha went i...
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Wise about Pleasure (extract)

"The Buddha was not down on pleasure, it’s simply that he was a real connoisseur. He said, "Why settle for second best when there’s best? And it’s available.” Now, we may decide that it seems awfully far away, and that we’re going to starve in the meantime unless we get the pleasures we want. But that’s taking the wrong attitude toward your pleasures. You can ask yourself, “Which pleasures are conducive to getting to the ultimate, and which ones are going to get in the way?” You focus on encouraging the ones that are conducive, letting go of the ones that’ll get in the way. That’s the real sign of wisdom. After all, the quest for wisdom begins with that question, "What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” This applies to how you deal with pleasures, how you deal with pains: pleasures of the senses and pleasures of the practice; pains of the senses, pains of the practice. So you want to be wise about pleasure, wise about your feelings. That way,...
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Deepening the Mind

"As for deepening the mind, the Buddha usually uses “deepening” to refer to arahantship, the point where the mind is so deeply rooted that it’s like a stone column sixteen spans tall, eight spans buried in the rock of a mountain. As for the eight spans above ground, no matter how strong the winds come from any of the eight directions — these are the winds of gain/loss, status/loss of status, praise/criticism, pleasure/pain — the stone column doesn’t shiver or shake. Sometimes the Buddha would use the image of depth as in the depth of the ocean. The fully awakened mind is unfathomable like the sea. It’s so deep you can’t measure it, so big you can’t measure it. Even though this technically applies to arahantship, you can hold that perception in mind: that you have a property of awareness larger than everything it knows, that goes deeper than everything it knows. It can encompass everything. Hold that image in mind. And that awareness keeps on knowing regardless of whether the body ...
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The Buddha’s solution is not simply to say, “Well, just be content where you are.” It’s to say that there’s something in the mind you can attain that will have a sense of enough.

"It’s this sense of not having had enough, not having enough: That’s what drives us. So the Buddha’s solution is not simply to say, “Well, just be content where you are.” It’s to say that there’s something in the mind you can attain that will have a sense of enough. It truly will be enough, more than enough. And there’s a path that leads there — but it’ll require that you tame your cravings. So look at that teaching as good news, a gift, because there are so many people in the world who don’t listen to it, and they suffer because of that. Right here’s the gift. Make the most of it. ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Slave to Craving"
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The Pursuit of True Happiness (conclusion)

"We have that chant, “May I be happy, may I be free from stress and pain.” We chant that every night before the meditation to remind ourselves of why we’re here: for true happiness. And it reminds us to look at all the things we do throughout the day that get in the way of that wish. It’s one our most sincere wishes, and yet we’re always doing things to block it, to get in its way. So try to keep this in mind. Keep checking, “What are you doing that’s getting in the way of true happiness? What are the unnecessary things you feel you just can’t do without, that are a built-in part of your personality?” They don’t have to be. They may have deep roots, but they can be uprooted, these habits we have. We’re working on the skills right now that can uproot them until we reach the point where we’re not causing ourselves or the people around us any unnecessary stress or pain. It may sound simple. It may even sound small-minded and small-hearted for a spiritual goal, but if you actually f...
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Think about the Buddha and his quest for awakening. His teachers taught him the dimension of nothingness and the dimension of neither perception or non-perception — very refined attainments. But he had a clear idea of where he wanted to go. He wanted the deathless.

"Again, think about the Buddha and his quest for awakening. His teachers taught him the dimension of nothingness and the dimension of neither perception or non-perception — very refined attainments. But he had a clear idea of where he wanted to go. He wanted the deathless, and he could see that neither of these were deathless. When he saw that these weren’t what he wanted, he moved on. If he hadn’t been clear about his goal, he might have been waylaid. After all, they offered him the position of teacher, but he didn’t want to teach unless he had something that was really of value to teach, something outside of the ordinary. So he was clear about his intention, and as a result he was able to succeed in the path. That’s how he got to the point where he didn’t have to be anybody and didn’t have to go anywhere. But you get to that point by being somebody and going someplace. So as long as you’re on the path, remember that this is a path, it’s not a place to lie down. If you lie down o...
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