Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- The Treasure Hunt… We apply our honesty — this is not to say we’re by nature either honest or dishonest, it’s just that we’ve developed both patterns — and we try to take advantage of our skillful habits to uproot the unskillful ones. How do we get honest and clear about our intentions? You have to make the mind really still. That’s why we’re …
- Protective Meditations… But they all come together on one topic, which is that they focus on the power of your intentions and the importance of being skillful in your intentions, simply that they remind you in different ways. With recollection of the Buddha, we think about his awakening, the qualities he developed—wisdom, compassion, purity—but the important point is that, in awakening, he learned a …
- A Mind Larger than the World… We think of their happiness in terms of their acting in skillful ways. Our happiness comes from our acting in skillful ways. This is why we’re not Buddhist doormats. There is that image where the bandits have pinned you down and they’re sawing you into little pieces with a two-handled saw, and that’s a case where they’ve overpowered you …
- Mind Your Own Business… You haven’t asked them, “Do I have your permission to think about your bad points?” So he counts it as a kind of inner theft, because when you start thinking about other people’s bad points and just keep the focus out there on how bad that person is, you’re bound to start breaking into speech that’s really not skillful. You …
- Attahi Attano Natho… You can identify with skillful thoughts. You don’t have to identify with unskillful ones. You can identify with skillful tendencies. You don’t have to identify with unskillful ones. You’re learning that you can be selective about what you identify with. That’s where the not-self teaching comes in. You realize: “This is something I don’t have to claim as …
- The Sublime Attitudes in Context… In one of the contexts, the Buddha talks about people who sit and reflect on teachings on karma, and what’s skillful and unskillful, and they realize that they’ve done a lot of unskillful things in the course of their lives. So what are you going to do? If you get tied up in remorse, that just makes things worse. It saps your …
- A Culture of Self Reliance… Here of course it means developing skillful qualities of mind and abandoning unskillful ones; developing skillful words and deeds, and abandoning unskillful ones; being discontent in the sense of seeing that there’s always room for improvement, or at the very least, making sure that you don’t lose whatever qualities you already have. It’s not just that you follow these values. The …
- A Friend When You’re on Your Own… You realize more and more that the training is really a matter of apprenticeship, hanging around somebody, picking up their attitudes and skills, because it’s not just the verbal knowledge. It’s also the knowledge of an attitude. It’s a quality of the heart, a way of looking at things. And some of those ways of looking at things can’t be …
- A Light in the Darkness… After all, this is a skill we’re working on. It’s not an intellectual puzzle where you can just think things through. Skills require dedication. They require time. They require commitment. There’s an interesting story they tell about choosing candidates for the brain surgery program at a famous university. As you can imagine, everybody who applies to be a brain surgeon has …
- Respect for Concentration… The beginning skill of meditation lies in learning how to notice them. As you let go of a particular thought, let go of a particular creation of the mind, the mind is actually released from that thought, and there’s a moment of stillness. What you want to do is learn to appreciate those moments, give them more space so that they connect. Even …
- Negative Emotions… It’s the basic skill you need if you’re going to see anything in the mind, if you’re going to gain any real training in the mind, to make a real difference in how the mind functions, make a real difference in how things are organized, how things are administered in the mind. So even though it sometimes may seem dumb just …
- Keep the Mind from Wandering… It’s an important skill. It’s an important thing to remember. This is process of wandering around in your thoughts is precisely what has caused you to wander around from one life to the next. So if you master the process now and learn to bring it at least under some control, that skill will serve you in good stead, even in the …
- Why Mindfulness… thoughts that lead to suffering and thoughts that lead away from suffering—in other words, thoughts that were unskillful and thoughts that were more skillful. So he decided to step back and look at these two types of thoughts to see what quality of mind was motivating each thought. If there was sensual desire, ill will, or a thought of cruelty, he knew that …
- Life in the Buddha’s Hospital… We suffer very little from what other people do, and a great deal from the lack of skill in our own minds. In the Canon the Buddha talks about how people should not give in to craving and conceit, and when we look at other people it’s obvious that he’s right. Their craving and conceit are obviously causing trouble. The trick, though …
- Producing Discernment… You get more sensitive to what you’re bringing, where it’s skillful, and where it’s not skillful, what you can do to change. Because there is an awful lot in the world that we can’t change. There are things outside that will trigger you. You can’t go around telling the world not to have triggers. After all, this is a …
- Deconstructing Anger… This is one of *the *big skills in meditation—learning how to step out of things, to step out of your mental states, and see them as constructs. And then you can reconstruct them – deconstruct the bad ones, and reconstruct something better in their place. The same analysis works when you’re meditating and you’re in a quieter place where you can look …
- Smart vs. Wise… The beginning of wisdom, he said, is, one, you go to a contemplative— someone who’s found the end of suffering, who knows something about the deathless; in other words, you go to the right people—and then two, you ask them, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What is blameless? What is skillful?” And then …
- Not-self in Context… As the Buddha said, when you have a sense of yourself, you have a sense of what talents and skills you’ve developed in terms of conviction, learning, persistence, relinquishment, discernment, and what he calls quick-wittedness—in other words, your use of your intelligence to come up with solutions to problems that haven’t been explained to you. You want to keep tabs …
- Refuge… But people who acted on skillful intentions with right view, understanding that action was important, that you had to be careful about what you did: Their actions were harmless, and they themselves suffered less harm, less suffering. In one way, you might think that seeing this larger picture could have been even more burdensome. It wasn’t just his suffering. It was everybody’s …
- Informing the Whole Committee… If you’re skillful, you can give all these different voices, all these different urges some form of gratification so they’re willing to pitch in with the effort. And as with any task, the more people you have working on the task, the quicker it gets done. So think of this as a group effort. You keep surveying to see which parts of …
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