The purpose of this series of blog postings is to explain everything I think you need to generate a true self-confidence.  It can be summed up as one thing:  Being born in the vajra family.

Without self-confidence you can accomplish nothing.  When you accomplish nothing, you feel like you are incapable of doing anything which reinforces your lack of self-confidence, so it is a vicious cycle.  The main point of being able to generate true self-confidence is to do so with respect to a reliable basis that is within your control.  If you base your self-confidence on something unreliable or outside your control, then your confidence will be unreliable and outside your control.  For example, my mother was a beauty queen when she was younger.  She basically accomplished most things in her life through her good looks.  But this proved unreliable for her because eventually our looks fail us and because we become dependent upon the opinion of others.  In contrast, if it is based on something reliable and within your control, then it becomes indestructible and is a true self-confidence.  This series of posts will explain how we can learn how to distinguish between these two, and how to cultivate this reliable basis.

This series of posts will organized as follows:  The first part will explore how to meditate on self-confidence.  This consists of generating within our mind the three reliable bases for self-confidence:  our virtuous actions, our overcoming of our delusions and our pure potential or true self. The second part will be on how to actually practice self-confidence through the mind of acceptance, through taking personal responsibility for others’ enlightenment and through learning how to become part of something bigger than ourselves, namely the Bodhisattva family.  The last part will be an exhortation to seize the precious opportunity we have before us and thereby fulfill our spiritual destiny – in short, we will learn how to become the bodhisattvas we were born to be!

My motivation for doing this series of posts is simple:  Venerable Tharchin once explained to me that if we know how the Dharma works, we will become incredible confident and effort will come easily.  We stand at a pivotal moment in the history of our tradition where we make the double transition from Eastern to Western but also Ancient to Modern.  This is why the book Modern Buddhism, and the tradition’s subsequent completely reorganizing of itself around the presentation in this book, is so important.  It provides us the frame of reference.  Our tradition has been reborn, so so must be.  For this to happen, we need great confidence.  Venerable Geshe-la knows these methods best and he is supremely confident.  If we understand why, we will be just as confident as he.