Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 131
  2. Throughout the Day
     … It’s a skill that every mature person has to develop, but the Buddha is asking you to develop it to the nth degree. In other words, be aware all the time of what your mind is doing, where it’s going, whether it’s going in the places it should be going or not. Because this is an extra duty that requires more … 
  3. The Buddha’s Map
     … What the Buddha’s offering us is some understanding of how the mind creates its cartoons, and how it can use its cartoons in a skillful way to arrive at something that’s not a cartoon—something that’s a reality. It’s not a perception; it’s not sensory consciousness. It’s not any of these insubstantial things that the Buddha calls aggregates … 
  4. Virtues Bright & Neither Dark nor Bright
     … He’d recommend that you get your motives and actions as skillful as possible. But the interesting overlap is that the precepts figure in both bright kamma and the kamma that’s neither dark nor bright. The difference seems to be that with bright kamma, you’re simply trying to hold by the precepts for the sake of gaining a good rebirth. But You … 
  5. The Carrot & the Stick
     … Part of the skill in being a meditator is learning when the mind needs the carrot and when it needs the stick. But always keep both of them ready. You may prefer the carrot to the stick, but you’ll find that you need both. That’s when you become your own teacher, not simply siding with your likes and dislikes, but really being … 
  6. Tranquility & Insight Through Jhāna
     … You need some tranquility and some insight in order to get into jhāna, and then, as the jhāna deepens—as you get more skilled at it—the tranquility gets more intense, and the opportunities for insight also get advanced. After all, what is tranquility? It’s learning how to settle in, be established, be steady. Think about the term for jhāna: It’s related … 
  7. Living Honorably
     … But the question is, do you have to make yourself suffer over that? Do you want to? The Buddha’s offering you a skill for how not to suffer. You look for the cause inside. You develop the strengths inside. The potential is there within all of us. We can develop these strengths. When the Buddha talked about the qualities that led to his … 
  8. Happy to Be Here
     … Now, as you get more and more skilled at this, you begin to get more and more sensitive to these processes of fabrication. For the time being, the main emphasis is on giving a lot of attention to the breath, being very careful about how you talk to yourself about the breath, how you talk to yourself about the meditation, how it’s going … 
  9. Random Word Generators
     … In fact, the more you can see the sentences as meaningless and pull yourself out of language altogether, the more clearly you’ll see that you’ve developed a really useful skill. There’s a section of the Canon, the Atthaka Vagga, that contains a whole series of poems on the topic of clinging and how to go beyond clinging. And one of the … 
  10. Bad Stuff Happens
     … You need to learn the skills not to let yourself suffer. You’ve got to look inside. The Buddha says we have to get rid of unskillful states. But to do that, we first have to admit that they’re there. And when the mind is in concentration, it’s in a much better place to be able to make that admission. We’ve … 
  11. Peace Requires Character
     … So we lay claim to our various skills for eating and we lay claim to the food that we want to eat. The problem is that the food sources are limited, the range of food in the world—I’m talking not just about physical food, but also all kinds of things in which people take their mental nourishment—is limited. And yet the … 
  12. Dethinking Thinking
     … You gain your range of perceptions that help the mind to settle down, that help you gain insight, and you’ve mastered the skills of taking apart any perceptions that are unhelpful or actually get in the way. That’s when you really can start counteracting that tendency to keep building dams and lodges, to create little worlds and then go travelling in them … 
  13. Creating a World of Concentration
     … There will come a time when you take these skills and apply them to other thought worlds that come into the mind—the ones that the mind tends to gravitate to, that seem to have a magnetic power over it, that pull it in, pull it in. You can begin to see: Okay, what’s the magnetism there? What’s the pull? And you … 
  14. The Four Precepts
     … In that way, you create a lot of the skills that you need as a meditator, because the precepts basically are teaching restraint. And this applies to all four of what they call the precepts—or principles—of purity. Sometimes the ajaans in Thailand like to shock people by saying, “Lay people have five precepts, but monks have only four.” They’re referring to … 
  15. True & Beneficial
     … You do have to make it skillful. Some people don’t like themselves. They’re happy to hear that there is no self, that what they don’t like doesn’t exist—but that aborts the path. There are things in yourself that you do have to develop. As for seeing the constructed nature of reality, it is true that your experience of the … 
  16. Asalha Puja
     … He did it so that he could find a skill that was really worthwhile, that would go to the heart of the problem of suffering, and so that he would be able to teach it as well. He had that kind of broad heart that didn’t want to solve the problem only for himself. He wanted to solve it for as many people … 
  17. Pleasure & Pain
     … How does that happen? Why are there these different layers in the mind? And who’s fooling whom here? Can you learn to detect the points where the mind is ready to go, when it hasn’t quite left the breath yet but it’s on its way? When you can do that, you’ve learned an important skill. You’ve also learned a … 
  18. Two Kinds of Middle
     … In this particular case the Buddha asked him, “Back when you were a lay person, were you skilled at playing the lute?” The monk answers, “Yes.” “What happened when the string was too tight? Did it sound good”? “No.” “When it was too loose, did it sound right?” “No. You have to tune the string so it’s just right.” “In the same say … 
  19. All Eye
     … So try to work on the skill of developing this alternative, where—instead of being focused on what your thoughts are—you’re focused on fully inhabiting the body, with your awareness spreading in all directions. Front and back, top and bottom are all equal, and everything is clear all around.
  20. Stretch Your Mind
     … he turned his mind to thinking of all beings dying and being reborn to see what the pattern was. And he figured out that it had to do with their actions. Skillful actions led to good rebirths; unskillful ones, to bad rebirths. It was a tendency, because of course, everybody’s actions were basically a mix. And in particular it had to do with … 
  21. Sophisticated Dhamma
     … But don’t be too quick to say, “Okay, that’s a good reason.” Keep probing, probing, saying No, No, No, until you’re really sure, 100% sure, that this really is a skillful intention. It’s something worth following through with. Now, it’s a lot easier to say No when you’ve got a good place to stay, a good solid foundation … 
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