Set your mind higher than the human realm, it's a lot easier to practice in heaven

"If you’re practicing and you still haven’t come to the end of the practice, what would you want? Where would you like to go? Part of the mind will say, “I want to stick with the practice,” but there are other parts of the mind that have other ideas about what would be a nice life. You’ve got to watch out for them. Learn how to reason with them, to see through them.

This is one of the reasons why we have that reflection on the body. It’s not only for dealing with lust. It’s also to get you to reflect that if you were to come back as a human being, you’d have to do this all over again: going through the period of being in a womb, coming out, and being totally defenseless; then gradually learning how to use this body and being subject to the illnesses that come with the body, and the aging, and the death that will come with the body. Do you want that again?

When the Buddha was asked to give some advice on how to counsel someone who was about to die, he basically said, “Set your mind higher than the human realm.” We’re told so many times that the human realm is the ideal place to practice because there’s such a mixture of pleasure and pain, but it’s also possible to practice in the deva realm. It’s a lot easier.

So you can reflect on the body and have that perception that the body is not something that you’d want to come back to. No matter how beautiful or handsome a body you could imagine, it still wouldn’t be worth coming back to. There are better things to come back to, if you have to come back."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Solving Real Problems"

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