If you don’t make it all the way to the Deathless in this lifetime, your quest for skillfulness insures that your next lifetime will keep heading in that direction. You build up a momentum.

"Even if we don’t get all the way to the ultimate skill of reaching the Deathless, the fact that we’ve trained ourselves to be more and more skillful leads the mind in the direction of less and less suffering. It inclines the mind in that direction. If you don’t make it all the way to the Deathless in this lifetime, your quest for skillfulness insures that your next lifetime will keep heading in that direction. You build up a momentum."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Anger" (Meditations2)

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