1. Stay sharp without ambition: You can reach far.

2. Stay free without tension: You can understand more.

3. Hold nothing, but observe everything: You can see deeper.

Details:

1. Stay sharp without ambition you can reach far.

• Example: Learning the Taiji martial art form:
  • First get rid of fear and worry from I and my – come from comparing heart.
  • Comparing heart creates ambitious heart and greedy heart.
  • If you are not greedy for anything then you are right away relaxed. You use comparing as a tool to help yourself improve not compare like I’m better than / at something.
  • Normally sharp for most people mean ambitious. But truly sharp is being wise and spiritual, while ambitious is not.
  • Easy to say, very hard to do.
• How to do?
  • Remain joyful in a wise way, no judgment.
  • Ambitious bring stressful, non-joyful feeling.
  • In class, you want to remain light and sharp with smiling and thankful, not ambitious and stressed with face down. It is a habit to develop.
  • Learning philosophy is not about put yourself into philosophy like I am learning this philosophy – ie you straight away try to put not pure into pure.
  • Practice connecting mental power to heart power – but must have joy behind.
• Smiling why important?
  • I’m waiting for your own joyful power from heart to learn – like Siddhartha’s first graduate student – light no tension, cut out ambitious feeling, cut out concentration with tense character of habit and keep sharp calmness to observe and enjoy to be aware of the eternal wisdom from Buddhism.
• What’s the difference between motivation, passion and ambitious?
  • When you have I ego involved.
  • If you have a goal, you just calmly to improve and reach it. I am going to enjoy do my best, try not to make mistakes but allowed to, no big deal. Passion is a chakra so it can be good, can be bad – gets out of control when ego there, lose calmness.
  • When something bad happens – bank manager calls – you don’t fire up ego then, you still need calm to do your best and correct it. Not add in all the other negative unwise attitudes and character habits.
  • Wise man knows in a bad situation all you have to do is find the wisdom, not create more stress into bad situation – add more suffering to already suffering is double-stupid!
  • Trouble, bad situation is Dharma Ending time – that’s normal – your lifestyle is not in a Pure Land paradise – BIG DIFFERENCE! Less spiritual highest wisdom teachers, more devil karma, be mature to aware of this.
  • Make yourself sharper and wiser, how to not make same mistake again. The extra you add in is called ambitious.

2. Stay free without tension

1. First wisdom: Attitude to find another way to enjoy, patient to observe it, finally you will reach it. Oh I did it wrong, how do I do it right next time?
2. Second wisdom: When you stuck in your own view you get tense. When you are relaxed you can feel all the angles. To make you power to understand more you need relaxed. Physical, mental and psychology.
3. All my teaching, a lot of my subjects – create many things as a habit, non-stop be aware of those habits and clean them out. Cleaning place, every day, make tidy and nice, worthwhile.
4. Cleaning is like Lotus. Scientists thought petals so flat nothing stay there and slide away. Actually under microscope, the petals inside have 1000 different detail layer to clean different kind of dust – size, angle, shape, detail each one to match a dust.

Same build up a lot of discipline to observe your desires, your passion, your emotion, mental and physical, observing how you create tension and where it comes from. Make sure you clean up roots, build up more discipline, build up more wisdom to keep cleaning, and protect yourself not to get dirty.

When you can live without tension you feel free. True freedom is the moment that ahhhhhh nothing bother you anymore. Ahhhhh. Not important anymore. When nothing bother you feel joyful. Then it is spiritual love.  Spiritual love is a very content feeling. The moment you feel happy nothing polluted there and share wonderful energy there. Then if the other have that you reflect each other suddenly life is so beautiful.

And when you feel joyful you can share it with others.

3. Hold nothing but observe everything

1. Contradiction: Whenever you hold something that is the only thing you can observe.
2. You are too much stuck in something. Not good  news. You are already out of number 2 wisdom, you have tension, and you out of the first wisdom, you are already surely ambitious.
3. Number 4 appears only when 1 and 2 are successful.
4. Think about Amitabha system now, because whenever ambitious or tense then not possible to follow his first condition.

Sharp, joyful, light, free and still observe is the game.

This post is taken from a talk by Forever Wisdom Forest on 13 October 2013.