What is the cure for complacency in practice?
Good question.
urgency, the sense of urgency.
Association, it's always about association with people who have a sense of urgency.
When you're alone it's very easy to become complacent and not only complacent but somehow resigned because practice is difficult and without support, without mutual interactive support it's easy to get weighed down, bogged down by
the sensual world and people who are disinclined to practice.
You start to say, well, they're not practicing.
At least I'm as good as everybody else or so on.
So that's the biggest thing is association with good people.
Part of that can be listening to talks or reading books.
studying, getting teachings that are inclined.
A big one is to practice those meditations, but here meditation just in the sense of reflections, recollections of death, of
the three characteristics, impermanent suffering and non-self, in a conventional or conceptual context, like the idea that everything is impermanent and all of these things that we're clinging to are going to have to change and so on.
the realization that nothing is stable and that at any moment we could be subject to great suffering from any number of causes, sickness, accidents, even natural disasters, human-made disasters, accidents, all sorts of things, robberies, crime, punishment,
many, many, anything could happen.
And so thinking about these sorts of things, meditating on them, meditating on the inevitability of death, meditating on even, say, the repulsiveness of the body, meditating on the nature of the body parts as being not as desirable as we think they are, allows us to cultivate a sense of urgency and the need for practice.
So there's, you can read up about it.
I would read the Visuddhimanga, the parts about these various meditations.
And reading about that helps to cultivate a sense of urgency.
But yeah, the biggest thing is to find a meditation center, do a meditation course, stay with a teacher, hang out with monks and meditators, meditation teachers.
And do the best you can.
I mean, you're not going to be the perfect meditator where you're always gung-ho on the practice and sometimes you're going to be down about it.
So try your best to cultivate as much impetus to practice as you can and do what you can.
some help there but ultimately in the end it's a hard and twisted and sometimes roundabout route so effort will come the more you practice and will come in time I think we often it's true many people very easy to become complacent and so worth all of us worth considering
the means of becoming more, more energetic and more
inclined and invigorated towards the practice.
Our teacher, Ajahn Tong, he was asked this.
I was sitting there and I was translating and someone said, you know, how do I do this?
And he said, well, you just think like in the world, in a worldly context, if you don't work hard, then you don't get paid.
You can't succeed in the world if you don't work hard.
How could it be any different in the practice?
The problem is that people think of the Dhamma as being some kind of hobby or some kind of side activity, something that we do on the weekends maybe.
And so by not taking it seriously, of course, it's just like a worldly pursuit.
If you don't cultivate it, if you don't work hard at it, you can't hope to succeed.
So reflections like that are, I think, quite helpful.
That was his advice.