Notes from Shi Heng Yi on the Eightfold Path

Noble 8-fold path is a guideline for learning how to implement a new way of living your life, so that means every day, think about what right understanding means to you. If there is something to adjust within your life, then the Eightfold path is a way to get you to the finality of the adjustment.

#1 - Right Understanding

• Learning to see how things really are. See night and day at the same time. Nothing is permanent. Adjust first of all your understanding of knowing the kind of existence you are embedded in. Understanding that this world isn't about you. You're observing more around you to figure out if there's a structure or repetition of things. Based on that arises the right thought. Research what right understanding means.

#2 - Right Thought / Right Thinking

• The absence of wrong thought. You don't want to look at other people and think of them badly for the sake of having ill thought. Think about how thoughts are being created within yourself.

#3 - Right Speech

• The absence of wrong talk (gossiping). It doesn't mean only take care of what you are talking about, but paying attention to when you say the truth. It's not always the right point and time to speak the truth to someone - know the truth to say at the right time with the right understanding. Everywhere you, pay attention to what is leaving your mouth - the tone you speak to people in, what type of vocabulary you're using, why you are talking to people. Become aware of what is it that your are transmitting, and not only what you want to transmit. It's not important what you mean, it's about how other people understand it. Cultivate mutual understanding.

#4 - Right Action / Behavior

• First we are thinking, then we are talking about it, then we are doing it. The conditioning of who you become is consistent with the daily actions you are doing, the habits, the behavior you're putting towards others.

#5 - Right Livelihood

• How are you earning your living and living the possibilities that arise in your life. Are you causing harm along with your profession. Right livelihood plays an important role in daily life, because if you claim you are a person who doesn't want to cause harm, you have to make it from beginning until the end of your day every day without excuses to not harm, even within how you earn your livelihood.

#6 - Right Effort

• You know the path, you know what needs to be done. Doing the right things is a difficult thing to do. Continuously pay attention and have patience in fulfilling and trying to put these type of guidelines into your daily life.

#7 - Right Concentration

• To be aware of where you are focusing your energy and intention. What does it mean - you need to do the research.

#8 - Right Meditation

• Do you have inside your daily life a meditative practice. Meditation is the practical way to start and see more. To bring clarity to your life. Clarity meaning seeing things and understanding things better. To be meditative is very closely related to how and what you are understanding. It's not a chronology of steps, all of them are being done at the same time and are interwoven with one another. There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.