Difficulty in realizing and actualizing precepts

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It's not easy to actualize the high Buddhist ideals in the turbulent waters of everyday living. Three things can help:

  1. It helps to have a very clear understanding what the Buddhist concepts like "right-intention" etc. really refer to. Often the canonical definitions don't provide enough details to latch on in immediate experience. This is where a live teacher can help, or ask specific questions here on Q&A: "how does the right-intention manifest in real-life practice? what are the typical challenges and are there any techniques for overcoming them?". It is said that the most difficult problem in Buddhism is to get the sense of immediacy, and once you got that -- Enlightenment is within reach.

  2. As Shrawaka correctly pointed out, you can't expect to skip from your current karmic situation to a perfect karmic situation - with no intermediate steps. As my first teacher explained, karma exhibits inertia, it is very inertial. So you need to start seeding better karmic seeds now, and patiently hold on until the situation will change. If you seed better seeds more or less consistently over a long time - the external situation will change, I promise -- as I was promised to, back in the day.

  3. As my last teacher said, many of our precept breaches / behavior problems (losing temper or giving in to obsession or panicking etc.) come from not staying inside our bodies (losing what's traditionally called kayagata-sati - "mindfulness of the body"). In simple words, when something non-trivial happens we very often "fly over" from our body to a place "over there" -- that being either the other person's perspective or some imaginary point in abstract space. This somatic disconnect is the first step in the chain of events leading to a loss of control to kleshas (blinding affects). Instead, we should train to retain the sense of our bodies, phenomenologicaly always being "inside" our body (leaving aside the philosophical implications) - esp. continuously staying in touch with our lower abdomen, but also feet and face.

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As your comments "since my memories still haunt me especially when attempting to make peace with myself and others. The question why keeps pursuing me. e.g. Why is there hate? Why do others not see the destruction? Since i am unable to answer this in any meaningful way, it frustrates me leading to nihilistic views." I think "Kamma" and it's reaction always with us.

Every action, every thought, every idle word sets up reactions, according to the Universal Law. When one thinks a thought, that thought makes an impression on the Universal Consciousness. Nothing is lost or done in secret. Everything is done within the Universal Consciousness, and the Whole is affected by it (as well as all others within the Whole).

http://www.edgarcayce.org/ps2/soul_life_destiny_fate_karma.html

Everyone involved in our present lives was very likely involved in our past lives. Actually, it is likely they have been involved in many of our past lives. Our parents, brothers and sisters, spouses, children, friends, colleagues, bosses and employees, and even our enemies began sharing life with us long before the present lifetime.

Past Lives & Present Relationships - by John Van Auken

How to end this 'karmic action' and earn 'Peace' is shown in Buddhist practice.

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