Thanissaro Bhikkhu on the Ultimate Goal

"The idea that you have no choice in the present moment has no real basis in what the Buddha taught. You wonder why people would want to teach it, and wonder why people would want to listen to it and accept it. Usually it’s offered as saying, “Well, it’s a great relief that you’re not to be blamed for anything.” It’s like saying, “Well, there’s a huge mess right here, but it’s nobody’s fault, so you just live with the mess — can’t do anything about it.” If that’s your main concern — not to be blamed for the mess — then something’s really wrong. If there’s something that you’re doing that’s making a mess and you can stop, why continue living in the mess? As the Buddha saw: Our minds are a mess, or as he said, our minds are on fire. And we can put the fire out. That’s what his teachings are all about, why he called his goal nibbāna, which means the extinguishing of the fires of greed, fires of aversion, fires of delusion." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "You Can Make a Difference

"We have to pay very close attention to our intentions. It may seem like we’re are focusing on little tiny things when the vast space of the unconditioned is all around us, just waiting to be found, but you don’t find the unconditioned by getting spacey. You find it by paying very close attention to what you’re doing, catching yourself in the act of creating suffering and then learning how to let go, i.e., how to stop doing that. It’s in seeing unskillful intentions, learning to drop them, and dropping them with awareness: That’s where the knowledge for awakening will arise. So it’s in looking at the details that you’re going to open up to something larger. A lot of people don’t like that idea. They’d rather just let go of their lives and messes they’ve created. Instead of trying to straighten out their messes, they’d like to say that the messes don’t matter, because the mind will then open up to something bigger, and somehow the messes will take care of themselves. You’ve got to

"This is why as we practice meditation. It’s not just a question of being mindful and alert, it also means developing a sense of ease and fullness in the present moment: the realization that you can just sit here and breathe, and you can have a strong sense of ease, refreshment, rapture even in the present moment. This nourishes the mind. When the mind is nourished, it can look at a situation with a lot more equanimity, a lot more objectivity, whatever the situation, and see what it needs to be done, what would be the skillful thing, the harmless thing to do right now, and it’s willing and able to do it This is how the mind achieves completion, fullness, by developing a sense of fullness in the present moment in the breath, and then working on that to develop fullness of understanding, fullness of discernment, till ultimately you can make yourself a full-fledged member of that noble Sangha as well. Because this is the other part of the teaching that’s always relevant: The teaching

"So it’s good to develop goodwill [mettā], compassion: thinking of all the suffering people in the world and how much all the strife in the world comes from the fact that people are suffering. Of course, the strife causes more suffering. It just goes around and around and around like that. You’ve got to feel sorry for the people who are tied up in that. You want to get out, but at the same time you have to have compassion for the people who seem tied up. Having compassion for yourself, of course, means that you want to get out, too. But when you have goodwill and compassion for all, that helps to guarantee that in your efforts to get out, you act skillfully. Because if you act unskillfully in your efforts to get out, you get pulled right back in. So have some compassion for all the suffering beings of the world — yourself included, but remember everybody else around you here, too. The only people who are not suffering right now are arahants. Which means that the vast majority of t

"We hear over and over again that, because of the principle of impermanence, even Awakening must be impermanent, but that’s not true. The Buddha didn’t say that everything is impermanent, only that conditioned things are impermanent. And even on the conditioned level, it’s possible to make irrevocable changes. This is why training the mind is so worthwhile." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Knife of Discernment" (Meditations2)