You’re making decisions about what to do all the time based on how far ahead you calculate what the results of those decisions are going to be.

"I’ve noticed over the years that when I teach in various places, the teaching that sets most people off is the teaching on rebirth. They regard it as totally irrelevant, but it’s not. You’re making decisions about what to do all the time based on how you calculate what the results of those decisions are going to be. If your calculation includes only this one lifetime, you’re really going to limit your sense of where the dangers are in the mind — what an act of desire or an act of attachment might do — which means that you end up with a lot of things in the mind that don’t get probed, don’t get investigated because they seem perfectly innocuous or perfectly fine.

You get a nice state of equanimity and you feel it’s going to take care of you. But as the Buddha points out, you can get stuck on equanimity. It leads to a long rebirth in a nice place, but even those nice places are places you’ll ultimately have to leave. When you leave them, the number of people who go on to other nice places is like a tiny bit of dust under your fingernail, whereas the number of people who fall into the realms of deprivation are like the whole Earth. So even equanimity has its dangers as something you have to probe into.

If you keep the perspective of rebirth in mind, on the one hand it reminds you of the dangers that are right here, and you can’t be complacent about any little thing that’s happening in the mind. But on the other hand, it reminds you that whatever effort you put in is not wasted. Even if your life were to end tonight, the fact that you’re on this trajectory keeps you going the right direction. It’s not all wiped out by the fact of death."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Being Your Own Teacher"

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