I'd like to talk about Mara. Mara is a name of our ignorance more or less, it's a personification of our ignorance. Now Mara can also come in the form of somebody else, sweeping us in a certain way. Mara can be very tricky, and spiritual complacency is possibly one of the craftiest weapons of Mara. It's like we come into the practice, we've got some sort of Dukkha, we've got some angers, some fears, grief, whatever it is. We do the practice for a while, and we get over a lot of this. We're able to handle it, we're able to be more calm, more relaxed and so on. And everything's fine. And part of our mind says, "Yeah, you've done it! You can relax now, you can enjoy everything! No worries, no worries!" Spiritual complacency sets in. And we don't grow, and we just don't grow, and we go to a retreat maybe once a year or once every three years or whatever, and our life's more peaceful and we've stopped doing a lot of things that were harmful to ourselves. But there's still these other things, like the question a day or two ago about drinking wine with dinner and things. We get comfortable in our life.
Spiritual complacency is the problem that's going on when we stagnate. We get to a certain point and we're stagnated. We're going to be giving you, hopefully later in the retreat, a way of jumpstarting your practice, we're going to show you some ways to push your Paramis' growth. You've got to be able to say to yourself, "This is lovely, this is nice, but it's not good enough." Mara, the ignorant side of the mind, wants to tell us, "But it is good enough, look at how much Dukkha you've overcome, look how much nicer you are, you've got friends that are good people," and this and that. But it's a kind of stop area, and we do want to, in the terms here, "notice and counteract" this part of Mara, this spiritual complacency.
For a lot of people when New Year's Eve comes, they recognize something in their life they're not happy about, they make a New Year's Resolution to resolve it, to improve it, etc. But that's usually only on areas that they're not happy about. How many people on New Year's Eve say, "Well, I'm much more compassionate than I was a year ago, but I think I'll resolve to be even more compassionate!" How many people do that on New Year's Eve? Not many at all. So we're going to give you a guided meditation, later hopefully, on the Ten Paramis and show you how to counteract spiritual complacency.