Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. Interconnectedness
     … The good things you do help you and help the people around you—if you’re really skillful. This means going beyond ordinary good intentions to informed good intentions, skillful good intentions. Those are the kinds of intentions you want to work on. As we meditate we’re developing the qualities we need to make our intentions more skillful. We take our one intention … 
  3. Attahi Attano Natho
     … It’s a matter of skill, and you can’t make other people skillful. The best you can do is give them advice and set a good example by being skillful yourself. But it’s up to each of us. So we reflect on what we’re doing, how skillful we are. We have to be responsible for ourselves. Our problem is, all too … 
  4. Ignorance
     … It was from this basic distinction between skillful and unskillful that the Buddha drew out the four Noble Truths: skillful causes, the path; unskillful causes, craving; the results of skillful causes, i.e., the end of suffering; and the results of unskillful causes, i.e., continued suffering. Those are the four categories of the four Truths. And this, the Buddha said, is precisely what … 
  5. Delight in Concentration
     … With right effort, you generate desire, uphold the intent to abandon what’s unskillful, to develop what’s skillful. If something unskillful has already arisen, you try to abandon it. If it hasn’t yet arisen, you try to make sure it doesn’t. As for skillful things, if they’re not there yet, you give rise to them. When they are there, you … 
  6. Basic Wisdom
     … That’s where you need the third principle of wisdom, or discernment, which is knowing how to talk yourself into doing the more skillful alternative. In some cases it’s not a problem. If you like the action and it is more skillful, it’s very easy to drop the unskillful side. But suppose you don’t like the skillful action. Even though you … 
  7. The End of the World
     … You also focus on the skills you can develop while doing this, because those skills will hold you in good stead. In some cases, they’ll actually make all the difference here in this present world. Think of the case of the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic. Their ship had been crushed by the ice. There was nobody there to help them. It was … 
  8. Insight Is a Judgment Call
     … You can motivate yourself through skillful shame, skillful pride, compassion: compassion for others, compassion for yourself. Or you could do it simply through the pride that comes from learning how to do something skillfully: to make more and more skillful judgment calls. Another person that evening said to me, “You’re making it sound all very ordinary and psychological.” Well, that’s how it … 
  9. Analysis of Dhammas
     … And he characterized his search as the search for what is skillful. It’s an interesting connection—that to find the deathless, you’d have to find something skillful. He was assuming several things. One was that if the deathless is to be found, it’s going to be found through human action. It doesn’t just come floating by. Awakening is not a … 
  10. The View from the Mountaintop
     … You want to spend as much time as you can in mastering this skill so that you can take it home. You can’t take the environment of the monastery back with you, but you can take the skills. The skill we’re working on at the moment is the skill of learning how to get the mind to come to stillness, because in … 
  11. Worldly Narratives
     … a type of fabrication, but it’s skillful fabrication. There are certain aspects of the Buddha’s teachings that are non-dual but, when you’re getting on the path, dualism is very important. There are skillful ways of thinking and unskillful ways of thinking. You learn to encourage the skillful ones and drop the unskillful ones. See how far the skillful ones take … 
  12. Admirable Friendship
     … You could see him in action and say, “So this is how a skillful person acts; this is how a skillful person speaks; this is how a skillful person presents his ideas or her ideas.” This is where the external factor that’s most helpful for awakening comes in. The most helpful external factor is having admirable friendship, i.e. friendship with admirable people … 
  13. Free to Choose
     … Each person’s suffering is the result of his or her own lack of skill: That’s one of the meanings of avijja. You can’t make other people skillful, but you can develop skills on your own and you can use those skills to deal with this issue, because each of us does have this area of our awareness that nobody else can … 
  14. Discernment Is in the Doing
     … You try different alternatives and then you learn how to pass judgment in a skillful way. This is where you get into developing a skill—because, remember, warriors need their skills, too. They have to be skilled at archery; they have to be skilled at strategy; they have to learn how to read a situation. It’s like the people who go into the … 
  15. The Larger View
     … Empathetic joy is both for people who are currently happy and for people who are doing wise and skillful things that will eventually lead to happiness. When you think about it, it’s all over the world: men, women, children, people on every continent, every country. The human race has all kinds. And people’s skillfulness has nothing to do with their national background … 
  16. Magha Puja
     … The same principle applies to bringing your skillfulness to a high level of consummation: You want to keep asking yourself, “What more can I do in my thoughts, words, and deeds that would make them more skillful?” The Buddha said his own awakening was due to the fact that he never let himself rest content with the level of skillfulness he’d attained. If … 
  17. Kindfulness
     … As with any skill, you want to learn the basics with as few distractions as possible, along with a supportive environment, and helpful people to inspire you, to encourage you, to give you advice. So in the beginning, this happiness is very much dependent on conditions. But as you get more and more skilled, you find that you can carry the sense of being … 
  18. Between Right & Wrong
     … Something that was perfectly okay before becomes not okay as you get more skilled. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha uses people with skills as examples for the practice: cooks, soldiers, carpenters, archers. There’s no single “right way” that you can master right away. As Ajaan Lee says, you start out, say, weaving a basket. You look at it and … 
  19. The Desire to End All Desires
     … It was simply that, as he said, he would maintain his attitude of discontent with his level of skill. If he hadn’t yet reached the end of suffering, he’d have to keep developing more skill until he did. So how do you develop that discontent until you reach a level of skill that should truly make you content? You observe what you … 
  20. The Mind Comes First
     … But if you know you’re bringing skills with the breath—skills in how you talk to yourself, skills in how you picture things to yourself, what feelings you’re going to focus on—you can come with a lot more confidence. This has to do with situations not only outside, but also within the mind as well. Greed, aversion, and delusion can come … 
  21. Stepping Out of the Waves
     … So try to have the attitude that you’re mastering a skill. Whatever mental and emotional skills you’ve used in the past to master different skills, bring them to bear here. That’s how the meditation progresses.
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