พระอาจารย์สอนว่าจุดเริ่มต้นคือสัมมาทิฏฐิที่ถูกต้อง จากนั้นต้องตั้งเป้าหมายการปฏิบัติให้สูงและลงมือทำให้ได้จริงในทุกอิริยาบถของชีวิต จนการหลุดพ้นทั้งด้วยกำลังแห่งจิตและกำลังแห่งปัญญาเป็นไปโดยไม่มีทางเลี่ยงThe teacher explains that everything begins with right view, and from there a layperson must set a high goal for practice and actually live it in every posture of daily life, until liberation comes through both the power of mind and the power of wisdom.
A lay follower asked: as someone still living a household life, how should we build a new way of living that supports reaching the Triple Gem within, so that our practice keeps moving forward without interruption?
Right View Comes First
The first thing is right view — sammā-diṭṭhi. This is the foundation everything else depends on. In the Noble Eightfold Path, right view is listed first for a reason: if right view is correct, right intention, right action, right livelihood, , and all develop within its frame. How far any of them can grow depends on this first factor.
For example, if you decide that fifteen minutes of sitting today is enough, then fifteen minutes is exactly what you'll get. If you think one hour a day is the target, you'll only ever get one hour. As long as that thinking doesn't change, the result stays the same.
Set a High Goal, Then Actually Live It
Instead, aim for at least three hours a day, with a real target of eight. A day has twenty-four hours. When the three natural forces divide it up — takes eight, takes eight, and takes eight — at least that gives the wholesome side room to breathe, rather than letting the other sides dominate. When the wholesome has little room left, growth becomes difficult, because only the wholesome can bring real growth.
Looked at another way: eight hours for work, eight for sleep, and eight hours remaining — that remainder should belong to practice. It doesn't have to be sitting alone; bathing, daily chores, any routine can become practice too. The goal is to sit until it becomes automatic, able to continue across days and nights. This has been done before — yogis who sat through day and night, practitioners in China who sat continuously for days at a stretch, accomplished monks in Laos who sat for days and nights without break. If others have managed it, we can too, because the very reason we were born into this life is to attain and through wisdom, to reach the Triple Gem within, and to build and perfections. That is already our goal. If we don't set it high, we'll only ever reach something small.
So we need a new way of living that supports reaching the Triple Gem within. First, set the goal — then carry it into every posture and movement of the day. We are the inner Buddha image, and the inner Buddha image is us; wherever we go, we carry it with us.
An Example from One Disciple
One disciple who has studied with the teacher for several years has reached the Triple Gem within to a certain level. Recently this student shared that, in converon with the Triple Gem within, the teaching received was about living life so as to merge into oneness more and more — to the point of saying it's now almost hard to remember what it felt like to feel separate at all.
Two things set this student apart from most practitioners. First, an endless curiosity — whenever there was something to learn, the questions came, every single day, many topics, many times over, deepening understanding bit by bit. Second, real discipline in practice: waking early to do yoga, then sitting from morning until eleven or noon, studying dharma in the afternoon, teaching the practice to her mother remotely in the evening, and joining the group for a late sitting at night. Nearly all of that person's time went toward just two things — liberation of mind and liberation through wisdom. Spending time this way, not reaching realization becomes almost impossible; sooner or later, it has to happen.
Liberation Through the Power of Mind and the Power of Wisdom
Concentration and wisdom — liberation of mind and liberation through wisdom — are the essential substance of practice, but they require a proper foundation of right view first. Sitting for many hours, or for a whole day, isn't possible without that understanding. Once right view is truly grasped, though, sitting all day becomes natural, and you won't even want to stop — the only reason to stop is when some necessary duty calls.
Liberation comes by two paths. The first is liberation through the power of mind: raising the quality of the mind step by step. There are said to be 121 states of consciousness, and we need to build enough strength to move from lower-quality states of mind toward higher-quality ones, one level at a time. The second is liberation through the power of wisdom — alongside strengthening the mind, we also need to develop and liberate through wisdom itself.