Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Metacognition… But then, even with skillful thinking, the Buddha saw that it had its drawbacks. You could think skillful thoughts for twenty-four hours a day, and even though they were skillful, they could tire you. When you get tired, it’s easy for unskillful thoughts to slip in. So the mind needs to be concentrated to gain some rest. What you’re doing is …
- A Full Life… This comes under the good life in that psychologist’s schema, where we’re mastering a skill. We’re mastering the skill of meditation. There are things we’ve got to give up—such as our fascination with our wandering thoughts, because these wandering thoughts have taken us wandering astray for a long, long time. Actions don’t just stay in the mind. They …
- Judicious vs. Judgmental… It’s like learning any skill. If, in one afternoon, you want to gain all the skills you’re going to need to play tennis, you end up doing them all very sloppily and won’t get the results you want. But if you realize that this may take time, you can work on one skill at a time: How do you keep your …
- Skills for Dying Well** It’s a recurring theme in the teachings of the ajaans that the skills you learn while you meditate are for use not only while you are sitting here with your eyes closed but also as you go through life—and they’re for use as you die as well. The skills that you gain in learning to keep the mind in one spot …
- Facing Your Responsibilities… You start entering into a dialogue with all your different skillful and unskillful ideas, your skillful and unskillful intentions. And you start converting more and more of your mind to the skillful side. That right there is an important achievement. Bit by bit you begin to figure out all the different ins and outs of the mind. You develop a greater sense of unity …
- Success by Approximation… It’s simply a matter of learning how to refine your sensitivity as to what’s skillful and what’s not. Which kinds of desires are skillful, and which kinds of desires are not? Which kinds of skillful qualities are appropriate for one particular situation, and which ones are appropriate for another? Remember the teaching on the seven factors for awakening. The factor of …
- Samsara… meritorious, i.e., good or skillful thought-constructs; unskillful ones; and ones that are neither skillful nor unskillful. Focus on thinking in skillful ways. If the mind has trouble settling down, you think about the Buddha. Think about him in ways that are inspiring. Or if he seems a little too unreal, too superhuman you can think about the Sangha, the noble Sangha. The …
- An Inside Job… that if you don’t master the skills, you’re going to suffer. If you do master the skills, you can avoid that suffering. And if you don’t work on those skills, do you really love yourself? Do you love the people around you? If you consciously do something you know is going to give you a little bit of pleasure right now …
- No Slivers in the Heart… He framed his search in terms of looking for what was skillful. He knew that there was something that had to be done. There was a skill to master in order to find the deathless. The skill itself doesn’t cause the deathless, but it enables you to get there, the same way that knowing how to climb a mountain doesn’t cause the …
- Using Right Resolve Rightly… Then you have the skill, as he says, to think the thoughts you want to think and not think the thoughts you don’t want to think. You have the skill both of skillful thinking and skillful not-thinking. That’s when you’ve used your right resolves in the right way.
- Using the Committee of the Mind… As for the skillful qualities to be developed, those are the factors for awakening: mindfulness, analysis of qualities—when the mind gets very clear about what’s skillful and what’s not skillful inside. That’s followed by persistence, where you actually try to abandon what’s unskillful, develop what’s skillful. You continue doing that, you keep at it until there’s a …
- Adult Dhamma… He had mastered this skill and he wanted to pass it on to us. It’s a very focused skill, focusing in on your mind and seeing what in the mind causes you to create suffering. It’s also a battle. There’s winning and losing. There’s doing the skill well and there’s doing it poorly. Now, there’s a frame of …
- Open Door Meditation… You’ve got to carry it, but in carrying it you learn a lot of important skills, necessary skills for understanding your mind and getting some control over it. And of course there’s the fact that if you’re fully present to what’s going on in your mind, then when unskillful things come up, you’re prepared. You can detect them more …
- Sensitivity & Skill… It’s also a pleasure that’s related to skill. We’re not just sitting here on the receiving end of something really nice. We’re also developing that sense of accomplishment that comes when you’ve mastered a skill. The self as the producer gets to produce things well. And as you master this as a skill, you start adopting the four noble …
- Think Your Way to Stillness… You can’t release it from its sense of self until you’ve trained your sense of self to be more and more skillful. And a lot of that has to do with not focusing so much on the issue of self, but more focusing on the skill that you’re working on here. As the skill gets better, your sense of self gets …
- Stepping Out of Truth Games… That’s a skill. And your ability to shift from one frame of reference to another frame of reference is going to come in handy. So the ability to watch the process of changing from one frame to another is an important skill to develop in the meditation, because when you get into concentration you should have a sense that nothing in the world …
- Change Your Perceptions… The fact that it does have its influences allows you to learn how to build on the skillful ones, or convert the less skillful ones into something more skillful. It’s like being a good cook. You may not have control over the produce coming into your kitchen, but you can learn the skills to make good food from whatever there is. So always …
- Look at Yourself… The ones that are more and more refined levels of skillfulness—that takes time. Something that’s skillful in the beginning of the practice—or that seems skillful in the beginning of the practice: After a while you begin to realize it’s skillful only on a coarse level. You’re trying to bring the mind into deeper and deeper levels of subtlety so …
- The Wisdom of Ardency… So the wise thing to do with that teaching is to try to develop skillful qualities inside so that you’re not creating suffering. In this way, the simple fact of wanting to be ardent is wise in and of itself. Then, as you’re ardent in developing skillful qualities, your wisdom grows, your discernment grows, as you learn new lessons that you don …
- Protest Your Virtue & Right View… You can understand how these things are made and all the technique and all the skill that goes into it. Well, here you’re trying to find out the skill—or the “skill”—with which the mind fools itself. Here we are, creating all these images inside, and then we give them reality. We ignore all the work that goes into creating a thought …
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