Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Discerning the Middle Way… This is one of the reasons why Ajaan Lee uses the mastery of a skill as his main image for the practice. It’s through doing things and then reading the results of what you’ve done and then making adjustments, that the path progresses. This is why his explanation of jhana places so much emphasis on the evaluation of the breath. Because that …
- Intense Stillness… Then when things get still, you’ve got a different set of skills to master: the maintaining. You have to keep coming back, expanding the range of your awareness. Make sure it doesn’t shrink at all. At the same time, you want to detect any slight disturbances before they turn into thought worlds that carry you away. So there’s work to do …
- Suffering Comes from Those You Love… The things that cause us to want to come back are here, but the skills we can develop so that we don’t have to come back can be developed here as well. Right here is where the work has to be done.
- Dispassion Is Freedom… developing skillful qualities, abandoning the unskillful ones. You want to take your pleasure there. Make it your sport, shooting down your defilements when you see them. And try to do a thorough job, as thorough a job as you can. It’s only when the path is fully developed that you might think about what would be better than having to fashion the path …
- Metta… May we all be happy.” What kind of happiness are we talking about here? Any kind of happiness that comes from skillful actions. The attitude of goodwill is called metta-cittena. The word citta in cittena can mean either heart or mind—it actually means both. The Buddha’s teachings don’t make a clear division between your thoughts and your emotions. You’re …
- Endurance & Equanimity… When you’ve seen that, you’ve mastered a really good skill. And you’ve developed a whole pile of perfections, because this requires discernment along with determination. You’ve also got the perfection of endurance and patience and the perfection of equanimity. That’s four perfections right there. If you can manage that many in a single day, you’re doing well.
- The Larger Picture… that we have the potential to learn from each little mistake we make, the potential to pick ourselves up and then move on, and to develop skill step by step by step. As for our desire for how quickly we want it to be done, again that’s referring to the past and the future when you want to focus in on the present …
- Death & Goodwill… And even if you don’t win, you won’t have any scars on your mind as to things you did and said that were not all that skillful. So think of these practices as going together. The fact of death gives more urgency to your goodwill, and the need for goodwill gives meaning to contemplation of death so that it’s not just …
- Not Pained by Pain… That’s what the Buddha’s skill is all about: learning to live with pain without being pained by it. After all, the great ajaans lived in the same human world that we live in—the same world, with the same problems, but they didn’t carry the pains around. As in that question that Ajaan Suwat once posed: He pointed over to Mount …
- Concentration Isn’t Dumb… You’re thinking about actions and trying to act in a way that’s skilled. That, too, is a kind of intelligence. So is knowing how to read the mind so that it can settle down and stay there. To keep it there, you have to protect it, because other thoughts will come up, and it’s so easy for the mind to jump …
- Happiness Comes from Inner Strength… You realize that you can restrain your less skillful impulses. You can refrain from harming other people. You give them safety, and in giving them safety, as the Buddha says, you gain a share in that safety as well. You create a world around you in which there’s less harm being done. You create a world in which truthful words are being spoken …
- Mindful All Day Long… But there’s a skill to doing every task in the course of the day. When you have the time, it’s good to try to think about that. Otherwise, if your work is really demanding, tell yourself, “I’m going to give 100% attention to my work while I’m doing it, and try to do my very best.” The habits you build …
- Discernment in Concentration… But try to be very conscious about what you’re doing, very deliberate about what you’re doing—so that you begin to get a sense of skill in the meditation. This is the kind of concentration that leads naturally to discernment because there’s discernment in the concentration itself. The stillness of the mind requires that you think about it and observe: What …
- Forgiveness… The things they do to one another in that fight are not all that skillful. They’re racking up more bad karma for themselves, yet they’re all going to die anyhow, even the so-called winners. So what’s accomplished by winning a game like that? Of course, then you come back, and somebody may want to pick up the game again. So …
- Effort against the Hindrances… You replace it with something skillful, in other words, you just bring it back to the breath. And try to make the breath more comfortable than it was before. Get yourself interested in the breath again. Because that kind of thought can be cured simply by giving yourself something new to think about. It’s simply caused by a lack of mindfulness. Your mindfulness …
- Nourishment from the Breath… The fourth basis for success is what turns the concentration into a skill. That’s discrimination. When you get clearer and clearer on what’s wrong and what’s right with the concentration, and you start getting ideas of how to fix what’s wrong and to maintain and augment what’s right, that’s the discernment element. In other words, you have to …
- The Strength of Conviction… You can use these basic skills of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, along with the lessons you learn from them about perception, about feeling, fabrication—all the aggregates, all the components of your mind: It’s through learning these lessons that you can find your way out. This was one of the Buddha’s great insights: that these aggregates we carry around can be fashioned …
- Speech for the Sake of Stillness… thoughts that led to skillful states of mind and thoughts that led to unskillful states of mind. With the unskillful ones, he said he’d hold them in check. He’d make sure that he wouldn’t go with thoughts of sensuality, thoughts of ill will, thoughts of cruelty. These things are not beneficial to anybody. As for thoughts of renunciation, thoughts of non …
- Don’t Be Afraid of Jhana… You’ve got a gate-keeper at the gate, i.e., mindfulness, who knows how to recognize who should be allowed into the fortress and who shouldn’t—who knows, in other words, what skillful qualities should be encouraged in the mind and which unskillful qualities should be abandoned. Well, the soldiers and the gate-keeper need food, and that’s what concentration is …
- Balanced Concentration… This is a skill that takes time. And it’s not just a matter of determination. It’s also a matter of understanding what’s going on, checking to see, when the mind leaves the present moment, where is it going, why is it going there, what are the things that trigger it to jump out and leave the body and go streaming outside …
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