Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- 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 …
- Capable… What’s skillful, what’s not skillful? How do you abandon what’s unskillful? How you develop what is skillful? You start with those questions, and then by the time you reach issues around emptiness or dependent co-arising, you’ll know what to do with them, because you will have developed a capability within yourself. So if you’re going to dedicate your …
- 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 …
- Training the Committee… If the mind were a single entity, how could it train itself? If it were already bad, how could a bad mind suddenly develop good motives, develop skills? The fact that we have many minds is actually what makes it possible for us to train our minds. The more skillful members can take the less skillful ones in hand, ideally. And to make that …
- Making an Effort… Once you get skilled at it, you realize it’s much easier, it takes much less effort, much less frantic energy, and the results are more lasting. You’ve got a skill inside that you can depend on. With the normal skills we have in terms of looking at this thing in such a way to find it interesting, looking at that in such …
- Heeding the Deva Messengers… At the same time, if there are no skillful desires, you try to give rise to them. Once they’re there, you try to maintain them. Now, this does involve some becoming, even though it’s skillful. But that’s how you get beyond unskillful becoming. You can’t just say, “I’m not going to have any desires at all,” because the mind …
- Choices… Just learn how to make it skillful, so that the skillful voices take over and the unskillful ones go quiet. Let them go. You’re using your powers of judgment here. That’s part of this path of choosing: choosing to be generous; choosing to be virtuous; choosing to develop your mindfulness, your concentration, your discernment; judging what gives rise to long-term good …
- What Are You Taking into the Future?… So these are the skills you want. And the direction you’re giving to your life by mastering these skills takes you where you want to go. We all want to go to a happiness that we can rely on, a happiness we can trust, and the Buddha’s showing us how it’s done. And just as we have our purpose, his Dhamma …
- A Sense of Well-being… If they’re not skillful, you can make them skillful; if they’re already relatively skillful, you can make them even more so. You can notice this when you focus on the breath. Your perception of the breath is shaped by the intentions you’ve had in the course of a day. The parts of the body that you tensed up in order to …
- Develop Your Inner Observer… The Buddha started with his instructions to Rahula, basically telling him to act only on skillful intentions. That’s the commitment part. Then, as he’s doing his actions and after they’re done, he should reflect on the results. If he sees any harm coming up while he’s doing the action, he should stop. If he sees no harm, he can continue …
- Pleasing to the Noble Ones… In order to be skillful at something, harmlessness means that you look at your actions and you don’t have to deny anything. So you can watch your mind clearly without any fear that you’re going to run into anything negative. You’re working on a skill and, as with any skill, you’re concerned about what you’re doing and the results …
- Skillful Attachments… You begin to question it more and more: “Do you really have to do this? Do you have to latch on to these things?” Your sense of the things that you would like to latch on to gets more and more restricted—in other words, more restricted to more skillful ways of identification. You begin to see that this whole issue of making a …
- Dealing with Confusion… As the Buddha once said, if it weren’t possible for people to choose the skillful course of action or to develop skillful mental states, he wouldn’t have taught it. But it is possible. And if it weren’t beneficial to develop skillful mental states, he wouldn’t have taught that, either. But it is beneficial, so that’s why he taught it …
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