Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- Where to Look in the Present… But meditation is a skill. The whole concept of skill is basic to the Buddha’s teachings. We’re working on a skill here, which means you have to be observant and learn from things. Keep in mind what you want to accomplish here. You do want to get the mind to settle down. You do want it to be clear. You do want …
- Responsible Happiness… So in the Buddha’s terms, we’re looking for a happiness that’s skillful and blameless, one that doesn’t develop bad qualities in the mind, doesn’t impose unfairly on other people. When the mind has a sense of well-being right now, then even the idea of acting in an unskillful way becomes very unattractive. So you’re changing the balance …
- The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha… You generate desire to give rise to skillful qualities and bring them to the culmination of their development. In other words, the desire here focuses primarily on the path. Nibbana itself is beyond skillful and unskillful, but the factors of the path, such as right mindfulness and right concentration, are skillful qualities you want to develop, to give rise to, and then bring to …
- Your Own Karma… Your past actions were done with the desire for happiness, and now you’re experiencing the skillfulness or lack of skillfulness in your past actions, in your past desires for happiness, your past efforts to bring about happiness. When you have that attitude, it’s a lot easier to live with other people. If they do something outrageous, you realize that you probably were …
- Fixing the Present… It’s in this way that the meditation becomes a skill. The Buddha’s word for skill is vijja, which is the opposite of avijja. Avijja means ignorance, but also means a lack of skill. It’s one of the causes for suffering. So as we develop more and more skill in how we approach the present moment, we find that we’re going …
- A Path of Aggregates… So you’re engaged in fabrication, it’s simply a matter of learning how to distinguish between what’s skillful and what’s not. A lot of people don’t like this because it takes time. There’s a gradual improvement in your detection of which actions are skillful, which thoughts are skillful, and which ones are not. That requires that you have to …
- Giving Meaning to Life… But in the meantime you develop a skillful sense. There is a sense of self-esteem that comes with knowing that you can learn. No matter how old you are, no matter how little or how much time is left to your life, you can still learn. The issue came up a while back: People who are really driven to accomplish things, really driven …
- Integrity — In Memory of Luang Loong… The skills you develop, and here skillful means skills of the heart and mind, good qualities of the heart and mind: Those are the things you take with you—paradoxically, by leaving a lot of them behind, giving them to the world. So try to make this an auspicious occasion. Look at your life and see in what areas you can improve it, what …
- Safety All Around… not only telling you that there is such a thing as skillful and unskillful action, but also telling you which actions are skillful, which actions are not. Then there’s training in the heightened mind, which basically is training in concentration. You’re finding an escape from pain other than in sensuality. The problem with sensuality is that it sets you up for all …
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