When the Radiant Abodes are developed, their complementary qualities help to balance one another. This balance is considered essential in Buddhist psychology. Because love, compassion, and joy can lead to excessive attachment, their warmth needs to be balanced with equanimity. Because equanimity can lead to excessive detachment, its coolness needs

This is a twenty-first principle of Buddhist psychology: 21 Virtue and integrity are necessary for genuine happiness. Guard your integrity with care.

In the stillness before our habits arise, we become free. In this pause, we can examine our intention.

a second. The first phase, in which we receive experience, is the result of past karma. In this phase, perception begins by waking the underlying stream of consciousness as if with a knock at the door. As a result, consciousness turns toward the sense door and begins to feel, investigate, and recognize the experience. All these receiving moments

Each time we focus our attention and follow our intentions, our nerves fire, synapses connect, and those neural patterns are strengthened. The neurons literally grow along that direction. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes the karmic process of conditioning with another metaphor: the image of planting seeds in consciousness. The seeds we plant

The most effective way to direct our karma is to clarify our motivation and set an intention. When our intention is to live with nobility, respect, and compassion, and we act from these intentions, we shape a positive future. When our motivation is rooted in anger, unworthiness, grasping, self-judgment, fear, and depression, and we act from these

The Fourth Noble Truth is the path to the end of suffering. This path is called the middle way. The middle way invites us to find peace wherever we are, here and now. By neither grasping nor resisting life, we can find wakefulness and freedom in the midst of our joys and sorrows. Following the middle path, we establish integrity, we learn to quiet

The Second Noble Truth describes the cause of suffering: grasping. Grasping, it explains, gives birth to aversion and delusion, and from these three roots arise all the other unhealthy states, such as jealousy, anxiety, hatred, addiction, possessiveness, and shamelessness. These are the causes of individual and global suffering. The Third Noble

Zen master Shunryu Suzuki summed up Buddhist teaching in this simple phrase: “Not always so.” My favorite cartoon shows a Bedouin family on camels traveling across a vast desert landscape. The father is first, on the largest camel, followed next by the mother and then the three children, each on slightly smaller camels. The father has turned his