Thanissaro Bhikkhu on the Ultimate Goal

"Whenever talking about awakening, there are always two dangers. The first danger is thinking that awakening is so far away that you give up any hope of attaining it. The other danger comes from the fact that there are many stages of concentration that sound very similar to awakening, and if you attain one of those you may think that you’ve attained awakening when in fact you haven’t. You’re still stuck in a fabricated state. In both cases, the danger lies in giving up your pursuit of being more skillful in your actions. The path to the end of suffering exists, but you stop or turn around. One way to avoid these dangers begins with having a right understanding of both kamma and mindfulness." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Kamma & Mindfulness Together"

"Whatever attachments were causing suffering, whatever ignorance was causing the diseases of the mind — greed, anger, and delusion: That ignorance can be gone for good. That’s the good news of the Buddha’s teaching. Even though there are things in the world that change and are impermanent, the effect that the Dhamma can have on the mind when it’s used with precision is once and for all. The suffering can be gone for once and for all. So do your best to master this skill. Do your best to get the mind in position so that you can apply that skill with precision. When the Buddha talks about knowing for yourself, this is how he recommends you go about it. It’s not just a matter of sitting around and deciding that you like or dislike a particular teaching. It’s seeing where it’s properly applied. That’s when you really come to appreciate the power of the Dhamma." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breath Meditation, Step by Step"

"One of the important things to understand as you come to practice the Dhamma is that you’re not running away from anything. If you want to run away from the human race: You come out here and what have you got? You’re sitting here under a tree, you’re sitting with a member of the human race. You want to run away from your body: You’re sitting there with your body. You want to run away from the issues of the mind: You find that when things are quiet, the issues have more space to come and confront you. So once you realize there’s no place to run away, what do you do? You have to turn around and learn how to deal with these things. If it’s something unskillful in the mind, you have to learn how to reason with it. You can’t just push it away and pretend it’s not there. You have to enter into a dialogue. As for the body, before you drop attachment to the body, you’re got to learn that the body has its good side. We were discussing today: We sit with the body, sit with the breath and t

"The good news here is that we don’t have to wait for a perfect society to find true happiness. It’s possible to put an end to our own sufferings — to stop “saṁsāra-ing” — no matter how bad the world is outside. And this should not be seen as a selfish pursuit. It would actually be more selfish to make people ashamed of their desire to be free so that they will come back to help you and your friends establish your ideas of justice, but with no true end in sight. A final, established state of justice is an impossibility. An unconditioned happiness, available to all regardless of their karmic background, is not. And the road to that happiness is far from selfish. It requires the activities of merit — generosity, virtue, and universal goodwill — which always spread long-term happiness in the world: a happiness that heals old divisions and creates no new ones in their place. In this way, those who attain this happiness are like the stars that are sucked out of space and