Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"This body we have, the mind we have: They’re like the gold you hear about in fairytales. The gremlin or the goblin gives you the gold, but it turns out that if you try to hoard the gold, it turns into ashes. It turns into feathers. But if, when you get the gold, you give it away, it keeps replenishing itself. It keeps repaying you in more and more ways. So as long as you have a body, as long as you have a mind, give them to whatever you find is noble, whatever you find is inspiring." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "You Bet Your Life"

"Goodwill [mettā] is a wish for happiness, a happiness that’s true, a happiness that’s blameless. And this wish is meant to be spread around. Again, it’s sometimes explained by saying that we’re all interconnected. We’re all part of one another, so we owe it to one another to have goodwill. But the Buddha never talks about who you “owe” goodwill to. He said it’s something you give to everybody regardless, because if you have ill will for people, you’re going to act unskillfully around them, and that’s going to become your kamma. So to protect yourself from yourself, you need to develop goodwill to be universal. As the Buddha said, it’s a determination. It’s not something that comes innately to us to have goodwill for everybody. We’re very easily inspired to ill will by people’s actions when they harm us or harm somebody we love, or harm somebody we think is undeserving of harm. So you have to be determined to have goodwill even for people who’ve been evil, cruel, and thoughtless....

"Never underestimate the power of the good example you create. This is how goodness gets spread around in the world: not by people talking, not by books, as much as by examples. When you see someone who’s done something really unselfish, it’s very inspiring. You realize, okay, the world is a place with good people, people who are able to overcome their defilements or their narrowness or whatever. The things that keep them bound up in the cycle of suffering and then revenge for suffering and then more suffering and then more revenge for suffering: That goes nowhere. We’ve seen way too much of that. But the people who stand up and say, “No, I’m not going to continue that way”: Those are the ones who make the human world a good world to be in, and they inspire us all. So you want your examples — the examples you set by your thoughts, words and deeds — to be good ones. That’s one of the ways in which you’re acting for the benefit of others." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu ...

"If you come to the meditation simply thinking, “What’s in it for me?” you won’t benefit much from the meditation. You’ve got to train yourself to say instead, “What’s in it for the whole mass of beings? To what extent can my meditation help them too?” At the very least, it gets you out of that feeding system. There’s at least one less mouth to be fed. In the meantime, you can be an inspiration. You can take refuge in the Sangha. It’s good to keep having members of the noble Sangha appearing in the world, so that it’s not just a matter of some story way in the past, the time of the Buddha or over there in Asia. When there are members of the noble Sangha appearing right now, that’s an inspiration to other meditators. So we’re not doing this just for ourselves. We’re doing it for everybody. If we can get to the point where we have less greed, aversion, and delusion, we’re not the only ones benefiting. Other people are suffering less from our greed, aversion, and delusion. If we ge...