Search results for: "Skillfulness"
- Page 41
- The Kamma of Meditation… Those who acted on skillful intentions with right view tended to go to higher destinations. The important word there is “tend,” because, as the Buddha saw, you can do skillful things but then have a change of heart—decide that you don’t believe in the principle of good kamma anymore. If you hold that change of heart all the way to the time …
- Invest in the Breath… A skill that you used to have and all of a sudden it’s going away: It’s as if your arm were cut off. We tend to identify ourselves around our skills: the self as the producer, the part of us that’s able to do things so that we can have some pleasure. And the skills that we worked so hard to …
- Mindreading… That’s where the real skill in meditation lies. Fortunately, there’s one quality that is always applicable, always appropriate, and that’s mindfulness, combined with alertness. In other words, keeping in mind the fact that you have to look after your mind and also remembering the various skills you’ve learned from meditation, being alert to what works and then remembering that: All …
- Resisting the Germs of Defilement… When you’re alert to what’s there in the mind, it can analyze it as to what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. Sometimes this quality is equated with seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. And that doesn’t mean just knowing what the four noble truths are, but remembering what they’re for: They’re for dividing up …
- Delusion… So it’s useful to read up on what’s skillful and what’s not, and on how to work with the mind and how to work with skillful actions in general, because it gives you a body of concepts to work with. For example, mindfulness: It’s very important to learn that mindfulness doesn’t just mean just being aware of something or …
- Effective Self-Discipline… As a meditator you need these same skills. The Buddha’s teaching comes in a lot of lists. And it’s interesting to notice the role that persistence has in almost all of them. But it’s also important to realize that persistence is not just brute effort. It’s an effort to be skillful—to figure out what works in helping the mind …
- Honesty… A lot of the practice is a question of skill in how to act in such a way that avoids suffering, and then finally cuts through the causes of suffering. That requires a lot of precision, a lot of dedication, all the qualities that you need in developing a skill. So when you come to the practice—say you’re going to focus on …
- The Flamethrowing Mind… People suffer because of their own lack of skill. You can’t make somebody else skillful, but you can show people that it is possible to behave in a skillful way. It’s like the ways in which manual skills develop. Back in the time of the European Enlightenment, they made an encyclopedia. The encyclopedia contained a lot of articles on the manual skills …
- Protection from Fools… So the skills you need to learn are skills to be learned right here. The place to stand to watch things is right here. The breath provides the space you can use to get out of some of the obsessions of the mind, so that when fools come into the mind, you can step back. You don’t have to go consorting with them …
- Selecting from the Teachings… The useful question is, “Okay, what is the skillful teaching to apply there?” You’re dealing with your sense of love for the person, your sense of loss. What’s the best you can do in that situation? What’s the best thing you can do with that love? Sitting around moping and feeling sorry for yourself is not a skillful application. You do …
- Escape Routes in the Present… So what this comes down to is that you have to learn these skills for finding space and well-being inside when things outside are confining, when things outside are difficult, so that you’re not constantly feeding on the thought of how difficult the conditions are. Conditions are conditions. You’ve got this alternative skill. And as you focus on the skill, the …
- Duties… With the first level of right view—about skillful action and unskillful action, the teachings on karma—the duty is to abandon anything unskillful in your actions and to develop whatever’s skillful. That, the Buddha said, is a categorical teaching. In other words, it’s true across the board for everybody. And again, the ought and the should here are conditional—conditioned on …
- Good Fences All Around You… It’s remembering what’s skillful and what’s not skillful. As you learn how to live with this fence of virtue and this fence of concentration, you begin to get a sense of which of your thoughts actually are useful and which ones are not. It may sometimes sound as if the Buddha is forbidding you from thinking ever again once you start …
- Emulating the Truth… to see which qualities of the mind are skillful, which ones are not skillful, by looking at what they actually lead to. This is how we also develop the wisdom faculty in the factors of awakening, the factor that’s called analysis of qualities, dhamma-vicaya: looking at what’s skillful in our actions, and what’s not skillful, and seeing that they’re …
- Pleasure on the Path… To get the most out of this pleasure, you want to learn how to regard it as a skill and focus on mastering the skill. Get some satisfaction in mastering the skill as you carry the sense of being centered—along with a soothing, healthy breath energy—into lots of different activities. As you get better and better at this, you can take it …
- Strength from Within… Mindfulness is also a kind of protection in that it helps you remember the lessons you’ve learned and remember the lessons from the Buddha about what should and shouldn’t be done, what counts as skillful and what doesn’t count as skillful. You want to always keep those things in mind as your main frame of reference. This means not focusing on …
- Bases for Success… It is a skill that can be mastered. And as you master the skill, you find that you bring all the elements of the path together: Right view in seeing that the training of the mind is going to make the difference between suffering and not suffering. Right resolve: You decide you want to find happiness in a way that doesn’t involve sensuality …
- Treasure Island… They start with ardent, Ardency is what makes everything skillful there, because mindfulness can simply be keeping anything in mind, skillful or unskillful; as you’re alert, you can watch yourself doing skillful or unskillful things, and it would count as alertness. But when you try to do this well, when you do it in a way that would give rise to concentration, that …
- Not-self as a Raft… When is it skillful and when is it not? And one of the things you discover as you develop more of the skills of the path is that your sense of your self will change. This is a truth that applies to all skills. If you get really good at playing the piano, your sense of who you are is going to change as …
- Cause & Effect… the fact that our unskillful desires give rise to suffering; skillful desires can bring an end to suffering. Our desires are about as intimate a part of ourselves as you can imagine. Yet we often don’t examine them carefully. What the Buddha is asking us to do is to look specifically: When you desire something, what are the results? Does acting on that …
- Load next page...
