Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Perfecting the Mind in an Imperfect World… What did they come from? Where do they lead? Then he learned how to keep the unskillful ones in check and to give free rein to the skillful ones. But even then, he said, if you give total free rein to your skillful thoughts, the mind gets tired after a while. So even skillful thoughts have their limitations. At that point, the most skillful …
- Undomesticated Happiness… But as the Buddha pointed out, we can’t do that, because your happiness has to depend on your own skills. Other people’s happiness has to depend on their own skills. You can’t make somebody else skillful. Think of Ajaan Lee’s example. You’re going to learn how to weave a basket. There are people who can teach you how to …
- The Carpenter’s Adze… As he said, he was looking for what was skillful, and that’s how skills are developed. You focus on the particulars of the skill, and the larger picture will begin to become clear. You can see this in his instructions on breath meditation. There was that one time when he was telling the monks to be mindful of the breath, and one monk …
- Pro-self, Pro-help… Once you see that there are unskillful and skillful qualities in the mind, you’ve got to do something about them. You’ve got to make sure the unskillful qualities don’t arise. If they do arise, you try to get rid of them. As for skillful qualities, you try to give rise to them. And then, once they’re there, you try to …
- Peace of Mind… And you need skills. It’s not that you’re simply looking haphazardly. There are skills for relating inside, skills for developing qualities of mind that are good, noble qualities of mind. This is what gives dignity to human life. This is what brings goodness to human life. The purpose of the meditation is to tap into those qualities and bring them to fulfillment …
- The Essence of the Dhamma… The Buddha himself said that part of the secret of his gaining awakening was that he didn’t rest content with skillful qualities. He kept trying to find out and to master what was more skillful. This means that you turn your attention away from trying to make your hut as nice as possible, or your robes as nice as possible, or worrying about …
- Acceptance Without Suffering… You can learn to understand your mind’s own lack of skill and you can replace it with a better skill. When you hunger for something that gives you a sense of strength and well-being, you can provide that food for yourself. That’s one of the things you have to accept: the fact that there’s going to be unpleasant speech. But …
- Appropriate Attention… It asks the questions: “What’s skillful? What’s not skillful?” And from there it goes into something implied by those questions. In other words, if something’s skillful, it’s going to be a skillful cause that leads to a desirable result; an unskillful cause leads to an undesirable result. Right there you’ve got the framework for the four noble truths. As …
- You Can Make a Difference… You should develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. And you can do that—you have the choice. And you’re going to benefit from choosing to abandon the unskillful ones and to do the skillful ones. This is how he protects you: one, helping you to see that your actions do have consequences, and then, two, pointing out which kinds of actions have …
- Teachings to Rahula… Sometimes that’s skillful and sometimes it’s not. You want to get used to the fact that everything you experience is the result of past actions and your present actions and the results of your present actions combined. Secondly, if you follow the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula and get used to being skillful in what you do every day, then it teaches …
- Working at Home… That requires skill: making sure you don’t get bored, making sure you don’t lose your focus, noticing when it begins to unravel, when it begins to fray, and learning how not to get complacent about repairing the little frayed ends. So as soon as the slightest leak develops in the roof, you’ve got to fix it. Otherwise mold sets in and …
- Part I : Basic Instructions… The more skilled we are, the more we can do with those choices. It’s like being a cook. A really skilled cook can go into a kitchen with just about anything, and come out with a really good dish to eat. Even if it’s just scraps, sometimes you can make good food out of it if you’re really skilled. We have …
- The Uses of Fear… You’re giving yourself some concrete skills that can underlie a realistic sense of confidence that you can manage your mind, that you can learn how to train the mind, regardless of the situation. This combination of fear and confidence constitutes the heedfulness that underlies the whole path. You become heedful to try to develop skillful qualities, i.e., qualities of mind that will …
- Harmless & Clearheaded… This is something you’ve got to work at every day, so that it becomes a skill. As with any other skill, it requires practice. One, you have to want to do it. Two, you have to stick with it. Three, you have to be very observant, really pay close attention to what you’re doing. And finally, use your imagination; use your ingenuity …
- For the Sake of the Deathless… We make the path skillful. It’s skillful in such a way that it arrives at the threshold of something that doesn’t change. In other words, it delivers us there. It doesn’t cause it. It’s just like taking your car and driving down to San Diego. It doesn’t cause San Diego, but the act of driving the car gets you …
- Consciousness, Name, & Form… In particular, when you focus on acts of attention and acts of intention, you see clearly that there are skillful ones and unskillful ones. Your perceptions can be skillful or unskillful, too. And whether they’re skillful or not has nothing to do with whether you like them or not. It has a lot to do with where they will take you. When you …
- Evaluation… One of the factors of awakening is analysis of qualities, which is a skill of looking at events in the mind to see which ones are skillful and which ones are unskillful. Try to make yourself sensitive to the fact that whatever comes from your mind is going to have an effect. It’s not just that things come and go, but that they …
- A Better Place to Feed… You think about what would qualify as true happiness, and a lot of the qualifications have to do with developing the skills to create this state of a large river inside, of wealth inside. Whatever we have to deal with in life, we have to process it. If your processing skills are poor, then, no matter what good stuff is coming from your past …
- Concentration & Insight… This is what I mean when I say that you’re changing the balance of power inside so that the most skillful intentions of the mind, the most skillful voices in the mind, get placed more and more in charge—and everybody benefits as a result. So, however much effort it takes to get the mind to be willing to settle down with the …
- Non-Verbal Discernment… This is one of the reasons why Ajaan Lee often talks about meditation as being like a manual skill. The knowledge of a manual skill is often very un-verbalized. When you’re planing some wood, for example, your sense of what’s just right—the right amount of pressure to put on the plane as you run it along, how deeply to cut …
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