Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Trust in Heedfulness… Is it going to be skillful or not? If it’s not a skillful intention, don’t act on it. If it is skillful, be clear about it. As when you’re meditating: Sit down and remember that you have a purpose for being here. Remind yourself of that purpose every time you meditate. This is why we have the chanting in the evening …
- Guardian Meditations… And again, many of the images and analogies have to do with skills: Being a skillful meditator is like being a skillful cook, carpenter, or archer. There’s a skillful way to perceive; there’s even a skillful way to feel. Feeling comes not only from raw data, streaming in from the outside, but also from an element of fabrication and mental impulse. A …
- Right View… the desire to learn how to create something really skillful out of them—which includes learning to develop skillful desires before you ultimately let them go. This is a basic pattern in the Buddha’s path. The fourth noble truth is to abandon unskillful states and to give rise to skillful states in the mind so you can understand what’s involved in giving …
- Wisdom for Dummies Revisited… Then ask yourself, “When is it skillful to identify with this idea? And when is it skillful to identify with that idea?” You have the freedom to choose. Selfing is a verb. It’s an activity, a kind of kamma. And as with all kinds of kamma, the question is, “When is it skillful? When is it not?” So give yourself a little more …
- To Practice Dying… That way, the skills you develop here are going to see you through all kinds of difficulties in life, all the way through death. So focus on mastering them well, so that instead of having willy-nilly to place your hopes on craving, you can place your hopes on the skills that come from being mindful, alert, knowledgeable, seeing things in terms of the …
- To Sustain Your Practice… So appropriate attention means paying attention to what you’re doing while at the same time keeping that question in mind: “What’s skillful, what’s unskillful? What should I do if I’m inclined to do something unskillful? What can I do to learn how to do what’s skillful? When I’m already doing something skillful, how can I maintain it?” You …
- Wise about Happiness… And ardency is wisdom in realizing that this is something really worth doing, worth doing well, and it sets to work at the skill that’s involved. That’s the kind of discernment the Buddha was talking about: strategic discernment, discernment in action. After all, as he points out, some kinds of happiness are not noble, others are noble. And among the ignoble forms …
- Ironclad Technique vs. No Technique… But the pleasure that comes from mastering a skill is one of the highest joys. For a lot of us, our joys come from consuming, taking things in. But there’s a higher level of joy that comes from mastering a skill, knowing that you can handle different situations. You’ve got techniques—plural—that you can apply, depending on what the situation is …
- The Identity Crutch… The process of following the path develops your skills in a sense of making you more sensitive, more alert—all the skills you’re going to need for awakening. But you don’t need to have a clearly articulated idea of awakening in order to follow the path. That’s one of the reasons why the Buddha didn’t talk about the goal that …
- Pushing the Three Characteristics… You always want to make sure that no matter what, no matter how good or bad the situation is, you always try to apply the skillful approach into the present moment, add as much skillful energy, as much skillful attention as you can. In other words, you have to try to be as constant as you can. Even though the results may be inconstant …
- Study & Practice… So it’s only in the actual application of right effort—in other words, noticing what’s skillful and what’s unskillful and doing your best to encourage what’s skillful and discourage what’s not—that the discernment really develops. This is why ardency is what Ajaan Lee identifies as the discernment element in mindfulness practice. You’re not just sitting there, watching …
- Alone with Your Mind… This is one of the causes of suffering, but as the Buddha said, there’s a skillful role for craving, too. That’s what you want to take advantage of here while you meditate. You give the mind a specific task. What’s giving it the task? Your craving, but it’s informed craving, skillful craving—craving based on the desire to gain some …
- Dhamma in Line with the Dhamma… The reason we suffer is our own lack of skill, our own need to feed. We learn how to overcome that need to feed by developing our skill. That’s the only way it can be done. You can’t develop skills for anyone else. But you’re not the only person who benefits from your own skills. You’ve pulled out of the …
- Free Sources of Energy… So even though the past may be delivering some raw material that you’d rather not have to deal with, you do have the choice right now of fabricating it in a more skillful way: thinking to yourself in a more skillful way, talking to yourself in a more skillful way, breathing in a more skillful way. There’s always the potential for something …
- A Room of Your Own… You can begin to pass judgment on what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, not in a judgmental way but an intelligent way, a useful way. “Judgmental” means that you come to quick judgments without really seeing all the evidence. “Using your judgment” means being discriminating and wise in how you evaluate what’s going on And that wisdom allows you to change …
- Cornered… You try to develop a skill. You’ll find yourself running up against your lack of skill here and there, but over time you begin to realize there are some things that you actually can change. You can develop more skill in some areas. In other areas, it’s just beyond you. This is where you discover the limitations of fabrication within yourself. And …
- Making a Refuge… And you try to develop the skills that are necessary, because some of the work that needs to be done is not just simple cleaning up. There’s more skilled work that needs to be done, too, and if you have those skills, then you’re welcome wherever you go. This is part of having an internal refuge or being your own refuge: the …
- Be Bigger Than Your Pains… That’s the skill we’re working on as we focus on the breath: developing qualities of mind we’re going to need to find that true happiness. We start with mindfulness because it’s a pretty simple mental faculty: just keeping something in mind, reminding yourself why you’re here: that you want to act in a skillful way, think in a skillful …
- Wisdom for Dummies… This is what’s meant by “skillful.” The distinction between skillful and unskillful is another basic principle. Once one of the Buddha’s lay students was accosted by someone from another tradition who asked him, “Well now, does your teacher teach about the origin of universe, or whether it’s finite or infinite?” He went down the list of the big issues of the …
- The Best of a Bad Situation… They haven’t learned the skills to deal with bad situations. Some people said that the attacks burst their complacent Buddhist bubbles. Of course that’s an oxymoron, a “complacent Buddhist.” But that was the kind of Buddhism we had back in those days. It was very complacent. People were used to consuming good things, not learning how to produce good things in their …
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