So my question back to you is.... how do we change that? It is easy to hypothesize but what should we do to gain these key ingredients? What are your thoughts?
mmm....
I'll give it a try.
Let's see, what do we have already:
1. time is beginning-less
2. the circumstances for my spiritual practice is not beginning-less, well at least not renunciation (if I have any), not to mention bodhichitta
3. I have loads of merit and some wisdom, obviously, otherwise I would not even be part of this conversation
4. without renunciation (at least), merit and wisdom are reduced to some kind of aristocratic samsara collections
5. my compulsion to take and justify unethical decisions denotes a weak wisdom mind that shatters when challenged by attachments, lacking in habits of focus and determination.
So, how to counter that?
I would say this:
A. develop renunciation with, at least, an aspiring bodhichitta.
B. keep building up the two accumulations of merit (*) and wisdom (**)
(*) with clean guru samaya, abide by my vows and serve my Guru
(**) through study, debate and the practice of meditation
C. build up a habit of resilience over my spiritual practice just like an athlete wanting to win the Olympic gold medal, and persevere with a joy over the result that is coming from the effort. I AM GOING TO MAKE IT! Hopefully this habit of perseverance will carry on from lifetime to lifetime.
So this comes down to renunciation again and how we get to achieve that mind, ain't it?
For us Gelugpas, the best would then be to go through the lamrim again and all chapters relevant to renunciation:
- the opportune human rebirth
- death (it will come, we don't know when and only Dharma is useful at the time of death)
- karma
- sufferings (banes, lower realms, upper realms and the 3 generic types)
- 12 inter-dependant links
If we have the merit to have found a Guru, then we should also develop Guru devotion and bodhicitta, for the simple reason that if we could not develop these yet we would not have found a Guru yet. So, yes, I guess it means that we are ready...
An alternative way is the 4 Noble truths:
- truth of suffering
- truth of its causes
- truth of the cessation of suffering
- truth of its causes
And here again it starts by recognizing our state of suffering so that a mind of renunciation may arise towards its causes.