Search results for: "Skillfulness"
- Page 133
- Five Precepts, Five Virtues… to do what’s skillful. That’s the best use of your freedom. If we’re free simply to follow our greed, aversion, and delusion, that’s a kind of slavery. But the freedom that comes when you realize, “Okay, I can choose my actions based on what the long-term results are going to be, and I have the inner strength I need …
- Step by Step… In the same way, each step in your quest for whatever your goal may be—if it’s a good goal, if it’s a skillful goal—each step is what’s going to guarantee that the goal is going to happen, is going to be attained. Don’t focus so much attention on the goal that you misstep. Dogen the Zen master has …
- Get Outside Yourself… the skills of getting out. Of course, that’s what meditation is all about, getting out of the cycle of death and rebirth, getting out of the cycle of your defilements. But it’s good to have some specific questions to help bring you to your senses, wake you up, because becomings are very much like dreams, worlds that we create. They have some …
- Ingenuity… As a meditator, you want to develop a repertoire of skills so that on the days when the mind is frazzled, you have the right way of breathing for a frazzled mind. On days when it’s tired, you have the right way of breathing for a tired mind. On days when it’s scattered about, what way of breathing is best for a …
- Potentials for Good… When you see somebody suffering, you focus on the potentials they have to become skillful, so that they don’t have to suffer from their bad karma. Then you learn how to look the same way at yourself. Of course, the more you look at yourself this way, the easier it is to look at other people in this way. So karma’s not …
- The Focus on Suffering… Try to be more and more skillful at those things. That fosters right view. Listen and learn, read. That’s another factor. Discuss what you’ve learned to make sure your understanding’s right. And then there are the two factors of tranquility and insight. As you develop these factors, you bring the mind to concentration. As the mind gets into good deep concentration …
- Perception… When you can use these perceptions to let go of the aggregates—including even skillful perceptions—then you open to something that’s even greater than you can imagine, in which there’s no perception, but there is the greatest happiness possible. So perception plays a huge role in the practice, both in identifying what’s what, and learning to retrain your perceptions of …
- The Path Is and Isn’t the Goal… Each breath is something to be pursued as something valuable, as a source of knowledge, as a guide in how to let go of unskillful mental qualities, and to develop skillful ones. So give each breath its due respect because as you respect the path, the goal will appear not anywhere else but right here. As the Buddha said, you touch awakening with the …
- Wherever You Go, There You Aren’t… but this is a skill I really want to learn.” When you bring that attitude toward being right here, that’s the proper narrative you should have. So many people approach meditation simply as a way to step out of their day-to-day narrative, rest for a while, but then when they step back into their daily life, they step back into the …
- Persistence… Try to stitch everything skillful together with your mindfulness. Keep remembering where you are, what you’re supposed to be doing. One of the roles of mindfulness is to notice what good things have not yet arisen so that you give rise to them; and if they have arisen, you maintain them. That’s mindfulness working together with right effort. So what do you …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Goal Orientation… Ānanda talks about skillful forms of craving. You hear that other people have gained the end of suffering, and you’d like to gain the end of suffering, too. Everything about the Buddha’s teachings is very goal-oriented. The Buddha himself was very goal-oriented. Look at his quest for awakening: six years of trying all kinds of different methods, even putting himself …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Load next page...
