Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- The River of Karma… In fact, a lot of his teachings on action come from the kind of lessons you learn by developing a skill. Think of any skill you’ve mastered: dancing, cooking, carpentry, plumbing, electricity, music, learning a language, learning how to teach. All of these things require that you observe your actions and learn from them. If you couldn’t learn from your actions, there …
- Action & the End of Action… One of them complained, “Why all this emphasis on skillful actions? Can’t we just open up to the oneness that connects us all?” This particular person happened to have his girlfriend there at the retreat, and I noticed in the breaks that he was not treating her very well. I kept thinking, “If anyone needs to learn how to be skillful, you’re …
- The Image of the Raft… As for skillful thoughts, he says it’s like being a cowherd during the dry season. The rice has been gathered. There’s no danger. The cows can go into the fields, and there’s nothing for them to eat, nothing for them to destroy, so they can wander as they like. But, as the Buddha noted, you can think skillful thoughts all day …
- Dharma Warriors… How are you going to face death? What skills are you going to bring to it? It is possible to die with skill, in a such a way that there’s no clinging, no craving, no suffering. And a life spent working on developing the skills for that battle is a life truly well-spent. So keep working on your skills. They may be …
- The Awful Truth… That’s a lot of what the skill that we need—so that we can be in charge of where our mind focuses, the questions it asks, the issues it takes up. This requires mindfulness, it requires alertness: the basic skills we work at when we’re staying with the breath. So have a sense of the importance of these qualities, and the importance …
- Success Through Maturity… If you’ve ever mastered a manual skill—a sport, carpentry, cooking, anything that requires time and energy to get really good at it—you’ve probably learned how to get your desire under control, get it focused on doing the steps right. When the steps are done right, the results will come. In this case, directed thought and evaluation are the causes. You …
- One Person… We make the decision—regardless of how other people are behaving, how responsible or irresponsible they may be—that we’re going to take responsibility for our actions, we’re going to do our best to make our decisions skillful. And as the Buddha said, even that first decision to act in a skillful way is, in itself, skillful. So you’ve got your …
- Concentration as a Skill… After all, you’re working on a skill, and the skill requires that you be dedicated to it. There has to be some sense of really wanting to do this, and then, once you’ve got it, you have to have a strong sense that it’s worth protecting. The essence of any skill is, on the one hand, learning the techniques. On the …
- Full-Body Breath… That’s how the Buddha would treat his skillful thoughts: dividing the skillful and unskillful ones in terms of what kind of mind state they came from and what kind of results they led to. That’s a useful lesson right there: Learn how to step out of your thought worlds and ask, Where does this thought come from and where does it go …
- Rebirth & Not-Self… So as you practice meditation, you want to get really good at being skillful in how you deal with these potentials, because as the body weakens, as the end of life approaches, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed. But if you’re confident in your skill, you can come out okay. The question sometimes comes up, as it came up today: When the …
- Virtue Contains the Practice… Is the Buddha really right about skillful behavior? If you try to behave skillfully and all you do is find yourself getting really tense about it, is it really all that skillful? Well, the real question is: Why are you getting tense? Is this the mind’s way of looking for an excuse not to stick with skillful behavior? There are ways of sticking …
- Safety in an Uncertain World… This is why we have to be protective against our own skillful actions—in other words, skillful actions that are not on the noble level. This is where discernment comes in, building on concentration, so that you can learn to see how the mind shapes its experience. As the Buddha says, insight gets developed when you ask the right questions about fabrications: what fabrications …
- Common Sense… What works is the common-sense approach that looks at things as they happen in the mind and notices the difference between skillful actions and unskillful ones—and teaching yourself to choose the skillful ones. Now, some of the principles as to what’s skillful and not can be taught. For instance, you’ve got the precepts. If you kill, it’s going to …
- Determined on Goodwill… We want people to behave in skillful ways, but they have the choice—just like you have the choice—to behave in skillful ways or unskillful ways. You can’t force them to be skillful, so you have to be prepared for the fact that people will behave in all kinds of horrible ways, and you can’t let that disturb your goodwill. I …
- To Depend on Yourself… But how can you get anybody to be more skillful for you? They can be skillful in their own actions, but they can’t make you more skillful. People who have genuine goodwill for you tell you, “Okay, you’ve got to be responsible for your choices.” This is why we meditate, so that we can see what our choices are doing as they …
- No Happiness Other than Peace… That requires you to develop the path—with the mind in good strong concentration, mindful and alert, imbued with right effort—so you can develop the skill needed to comprehend stress. Because each of the tasks is actually a skill. This is why the path is a gradual path, because it takes a while to develop the skills. After all, nibbana is very, very …
- Dealing with Limitations… It’s a question of skill. You can’t just push a skill on anybody. People have to see the need to develop the skill. They have to be willing to put in the time and the energy to do that. And they have to be in a position where they can. Sometimes people are too old or too sick to make much progress …
- Not-selfing Your Selves… both to see that there are these limitations—the various senses of self we harbor all entail a fair amount of suffering—and also to give us new skills and new selves to go with the desires underlying those skills. You have to take on quite a few new selves as a meditator: the self who practices the precepts, the self who learns how …
- Karma for Freedom… If you have skill in the present moment, you can shape things really nicely. If you lack skill, then the range of what you can do is limited. This is one of the reasons why we meditate, and why the meditation is focused on what we’re doing right now in the present moment. You make up your mind to breathe in one way …
- Magha Puja… to do the skillful thing. Be willing to learn what the skillful thing to do may be in any situation. You may not get there, but always try to hold to the intention that to want to learn, so that the intentions of the mind are always heightening your day-to-day concerns. This desire to be skillful is what leads the mind to …
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