Search results for: "Skillfulness"

  1. Page 143
  2. Seeing Distinctions
     … You’ve learned a new skill, a new approach. This is why we try to make the mind still: so that we can see these things and to put the mind into the mood that once it sees these things, it’s willing to make whatever changes in behavior are required. Try to keep this in mind. We’re bringing the mind to a … 
  3. When Attacked by Distractions
     … So you take that and compare it with the pleasure of a skill that you’ve mastered, where you can focus in on the breath and have a sense of well-being. Your way of calculating effort and the results of your effort will be measured against a much better standard.
  4. The Context for No Context
     … You begin to see how the different contexts you create around these events place burdens on you, whether they’re actively unskillful or just relatively skillful. The fact that you have to create these contexts means that you’re constantly keeping them alive, keeping them going. If you don’t maintain them, they pass away. You want to learn how to put the mind … 
  5. In Line with the Dhamma
     … How can you now make something skillful out for it, something that actually leads away from suffering? Let that challenge capture your imagination until the path is fully developed. That’s when it leads you to healthy dispassion. You’ve made up something really good with the mind. You’ve looked at all the other unskillful things you’ve been doing with your thoughts … 
  6. Top Priorities
     … So the students, who were coming before the master, decided they’d try some of their marshal arts skills against the donkey before they got to the pavilion. The first student went up to the donkey with one stance to deal with the donkey, and the donkey kicked him across the road. The second student came up and said, “You fool, that’s not … 
  7. Occupy Your Body
     … This skill is what allows you to go solidly into the formless states, where the sense of the body disappears. You are sitting here. You haven’t gone anywhere else. If you need to have the body, you can form it. It’s like that old science fiction story about teleporting people to the moon. They were working on the technology of teleportation and … 
  8. Purifying Gold
     … One is right effort, to generate the desire to get still here, and then to look after the mind to see what works in getting the mind to abandon unskillful qualities and develop skillful ones. Of these three qualities in the Buddha’s list, this is the one that contains the germs of discernment, realizing that this is something you’ve got to do … 
  9. Beyond Nature
     … It’s a skill you work on as you get more and more sensitive both to the process of fabrication and to the stress that it causes even at very subtle levels. Ultimately, you bring the mind to the point where you realize that no matter which direction you fabricate, which direction you intend, there’s going to be stress. If your discernment is … 
  10. Right Resolve in Real Life
     … Try to be on top of how your breathing feels and learn how to breathe in a way that feels good, even when things are falling apart around you, because that way your head will be a lot clearer in spite of the situation, and you can think of the most skillful thing to do. When you’re not stabbing yourself with events around … 
  11. On Not Twisting the Cow’s Horn
     … That’s when you give the mind something else to think about, something more skillful. This is how you can lean the mind into concentration. Once it’s there—you’re with the breath and the breath starts getting comfortable—then the next step of evaluation is: What do you do with that sense of comfort? It’s all too easy just to focus … 
  12. The Prison Break
     … The sense of you who’s watching over this and can perfect this skill: All these are part of the path. You let them go when the path has done its work, but you hold onto them to do the work. So, you want to get out of prison. Don’t believe the people who say, “Hey, the prison is okay. Learn to be … 
  13. The Path to Stream Entry
     … That’s one of the reasons why we try to do good things and act on only skillful intentions, because that makes the mind a lot easier to watch. Then, as you watch what the mind is doing, you begin to see that its doing goes very deep—deeper than you might have imagined. That relates to the expression of what’s seen through … 
  14. The Meaning of the Body
     … It’s also a good object for insight practice, developing insight into the whole issue of which actions are skillful, which ones are not; which mental qualities lead to suffering, which mental qualities lead to the end of suffering; which assumptions pile on suffering, which assumptions are part of the path. The word “sañña” has as one of its meanings “assumptions,” the way you … 
  15. Right Learning
     … In fact, Ajaan Lee says at one point when you’re really skillful, you find that you can feel comfortable with any kind of breath. Which shows again that the issue is less and less the physical side of the breathing, and more the mental side: your attitude toward the breathing, how you can learn how to fit in with almost any kind of … 
  16. What You Don’t Like About Yourself
     … That way, the extent to which your heart-and-mind has been involved in creating suffering, you can cure it using the teachings, developing the skills of the path. And that’s what meditation is all about.
  17. Equanimity Isn’t Everything
     … You have to will them into being; you have to be skillful in giving rise to them. Otherwise, they don’t happen. Pleasure not of the flesh is the pleasure that comes from jhana. That doesn’t just happen. You have to direct your thoughts; you have to evaluate things. There’s work that has to be done to get the mind into jhana … 
  18. Brahmaviharas on the Path
     … There’s wisdom here, too, in the sense of the set of questions that the Buddha says lie at the beginning of discernment: “What is skillful? What is blameless? What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The discernment here lies in recognizing that our actions are the big factors that lead to happiness, and that long-term … 
  19. Interdependence & Death
     … There is a skill to dying. There’s a passage where the Buddha’s leaving after having spent the rains retreat, and one of his cousins comes and asks, “When you’re gone and somebody’s dying, what do I do?” And the Buddha gave recommendations for the advice to give—and it’s good advice to give yourself. First, whatever you’re worried … 
  20. Proving the Teachings
     … If they’re made with knowledge—in particular, the kind of knowledge that see things in terms of cause and effect, skillful cause, unskillful cause, good results, bad results, the basic framework of these four noble truths—and you then act in line with that kind of knowledge, it makes all the difference in the world. You suffer much less. So the Buddha’s … 
  21. Putting Out the Fires
     … These are two separate skills. They’re connected but they’re different, in the sense that once you’re there, you’ve done what needs to be done to get the mind to settle down. Then the next question is how to maintain that, how to maintain that sense of balance in the midst of all the other distractions that may be either coming … 
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