Search results for: "Skillfulness"
- Page 43
- But Not Sick in Mind… We can also translate it as ingenuity, or as discrimination—in other words, seeing clearly what’s going on, making distinctions about what’s skillful and what’s not in the mind, and figuring out what to do about the things that are unskillful, figuring out what to do about the things that are skillful. In other words, you bring your powers of analysis …
- Appreciating Merit… delighting in abandoning and delighting in developing, i.e., delighting in skillful activities, training the mind to do things in a skillful way: abandoning unskillful habits and developing skillful ones in their place. The delight there is important. It means that your values support you in this practice. We were talking earlier today about the practice of merit, and about how, here in the …
- Watching Over Time… Keep watching and doing, watching and doing—and this is how skill develops. Skill, basically means being sensitive to the raw materials that you’re given in any given moment, and then being sensitive to what you’re doing, and then being sensitive to what the results are. These three things, when you put them together, give the mind a chance to develop skill …
- At Home with the Breath… That’s how you develop skill. In our society, we have lots of people who don’t have that many physical or manual skills. As a result, we tend to miss a lot of the character traits that go along with developing a manual skill: the willingness to try, try, try again and not just try in the sense of batting your head against …
- Alighting on the Dhamma… There are skillful events and unskillful events happening there. Once you notice they’re skillful or unskillful, then you know what to do. If something is skillful, you try to develop it. If it’s unskillful, you try to abandon it. All this comes under appropriate attention. Now, we don’t have the Buddha with us now. We can read some of the talks …
- Three Virtues for the Mind… Similarly with a person who does skillful things, says and thinks skillful things in the present life, but then suffers: That person may have some old bad karma that’s hogging all the opportunities right now. But the good actions will eventually show their results. In any event, even when things are going poorly, it doesn’t mean that you have to suffer from …
- Attachment to Precepts… So as the Buddha said, when you get beyond skillful habits, it’s not that you start engaging in unskillful habits. Getting beyond the skillful habits means that you’ve seen something that goes beyond them. But you still stick to them. In fact, you’re even more firm in sticking to them because you’ve seen how harmful it is to break the …
- Events as Events… In particular, when you get to acts of attention and acts of intention, there are skillful ones and unskillful ones. Your perceptions can be skillful or unskillful. Whether they’re skillful or not has nothing to do with whether you like them or not. It has a lot to do with where they’re going to take you. When you look at them on …
- Goodwill as Restraint… There are some difficult situations you have to learn how to accept because you can’t think of any skillful way out. In cases like that, you have to put up with the difficulty. You need to honor the principle of skillfulness more than your dislike of difficulty. That’s a form of restraint that’s hard but really important. One of the reasons …
- Fear of Letting Go… So when you realize that you’re not to where the path can take you yet, but you’re on the way, have confidence in your skillful qualities, confidence in your skillful states of mind, because that’s what the Buddha’s asking you to do. We place our confidence in him, but what does that mean? That we place confidence in actually trying …
- The Wounded Warrior… The solution to whatever problem there is in life starts primarily with looking at your own mind, admitting the fact you may have acted in unskillful ways in the past, but you can also train the mind to be more skillful now and on into the future. If you find that you’re not ready for the other ways of strengthening the mind, you …
- The Desire for Things to Be Different… You learn how to make it skillful. You learn how to focus it on skillful actions and you pursue the different skills of generosity, virtue, concentration, and discernment to see how far they can take you. As in that image of the relay chariots: The first one can’t take you all the way, but it can deliver you to the next one, which …
- False Friends… It’s learning a skill, to put you in a position where you really can choose who you want to hang out with and who you want to just let go. Often when thoughts come along, they’re really compelling. Yet sometimes the most compelling ones are the ones you have to avoid the most. You have to learn how to be really strict …
- Metta Isn’t Love… You realize it’s going to be up to them to develop skillful attitudes. It’s going to be up to you to develop skillful attitudes in your own mind. You want to make sure that your mind is not partial. Otherwise, you’re going to be good to the people you like and not good to the people you don’t like. That …
- Potentials for Energy… In other words, you look into your mind and you try to figure out what in there is skillful and what in there is not. Then you try to develop what’s skillful. Sometimes it may seem to be just a tiny part of the mind as you’re assailed on all sides by thoughts of this, that, thoughts of discouragement, thoughts of anger …
- Noble & True… The desires that are good for you are the ones that focus on trying to give rise to skillful qualities when they’re not there, and to develop them when they are. Or the desires to abandon unskillful qualities and once you’ve abandoned them, try to keep them from coming up again. Those kinds of desires are worth fostering because they’re part …
- Desire for Happiness… But as the principle of karma says, if you act with skillful intentions, the results will be happy, the results will be pleasant. This means we have to act with skillful intentions, intentions that don’t want to cause harm. It’s that desire not to cause harm and the realization that we have to implement it through the principle of karma: That’s …
- Cutting Through the Hype… what’s skillful and what’s not skillful.” Skillful meaning acts that don’t create harm, don’t create suffering, whereas unskillful acts do create harm and suffering. That’s essential. That’s what you’re looking for here. This is probably one of the most interesting applications of cause and effect. It’s not so much physical causes and effects. It’s more …
- To Escape the Prison of Time… Now, because there’s a pattern to what is skillful and unskillful, but there’s also room to adjust the forces of cause and effect, you have principle that provides the possibility for learning skills. After all, if there were no pattern, then what you learned today wouldn’t help you at all tomorrow. If the pattern were ironclad—in other words, totally predetermined …
- Reflect on What You’re Doing… And it’s easiest to pass judgment on your actions when you act only on skillful intentions. That’s when you’re going to learn that your skillful intentions may not be skillful enough. If you act on an intention you know is harmful, you don’t learn much from it. You caused harm because you planned to cause harm. What did you learn …
- Load next page...
