How to Turn Around One's Own Habitual Tendencies of Ignorance

All Buddhist practitioners should diligently cultivate meditative concentration (samādhi), overcome their old worldly habits, and turn their minds entirely toward cultivating the Path. Do not pay too much attention to worldly dharmas—things you have experienced over countless lifetimes; no matter how much attention you give them, they cannot resolve the great matter of birth and death. Once the great matter is handled well, all worldly affairs become nothing at all. Everyone should have the wisdom to recognize this principle.

Subduing and changing a habit is extremely difficult, and even being able to introspect and recognize that one has a certain habit is not easy. A habit is called a habit precisely because of long-term conditioning—it has accumulated too deeply and is deeply rooted. Almost all of our thoughts and views follow along with our habits. Without fairly strong meditative concentration to introspect and awaken to the fact that one's own thoughts and views are habits that should not exist, the vast majority of people do not know what habits they have, do not know that everything they think and ponder is wrong—that it is ignorance, karmic obstruction, and affliction—and following along with it leads toward birth and death.

Even if one recognizes one's habits of ignorance, they are still very hard to reverse and change. This requires us to constantly alert and spur ourselves on to single-mindedly devote ourselves to the Path, to give rise to an ardent aspiration to cultivate, to continually reflect on our karmic obstructions of birth and death, to contemplate the true meaning of life, to clearly recognize the true system of values, to see through the falseness and unreality of worldly dharmas, to quickly leap out of the fiery pit of birth and death, and then turn back to save more of our fellow practitioners and compatriots.