Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. Why We Practice the Way We Do
     … Then, as you take that principle of being continuous and apply it to trying to do what’s skillful and abandon what’s not, that becomes your right effort. As the Buddha said, to maintain skillful qualities in the mind requires energy, requires nourishment. This is where mindfulness and concentration come in. Here the Buddha defines the factors that lead you from mindfulness to … 
  12. Levels of the Breath
     … You understand them by learning how to master them, bringing them all together—as we’re doing right now when we focus on the breath—and approaching their fabrication as a skill. What’s the most skillful way to breathe? What’s the most skillful way to think about and evaluate your breath? What are the most skillful perceptions to apply to the breath … 
  13. Caring Enough to Doubt
     … It’s interesting that when the Buddha talks about the cure for doubt or uncertainty, the cure is the same as the program you follow for developing discernment—in other words, looking at what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in your mind, and seeing what happens as a result of those qualities. “If I develop the skillful qualities, what happens? What happens when … 
  14. Gaining the Dhamma Eye
     … There are skillful ways of selfing and unskillful ways, so you learn how to be more and more skillful in applying the four noble truths to the activity of selfing, realizing that there are some areas that you can change in terms of what you’re intending to do right now. As for the raw materials you’ve got, often they come from past … 
  15. Borrowed Goods
     … Anything that’s unskillful, you let it go, but for the time being, you hold on to skillful things. There’s a skill to letting go. You’re not going to comprehend the aggregates until you’ve made something good out of them. So you do your best to make something good, and treat them well, because you need them to practice. Someone once … 
  16. The Skill of Patience
     … And when you think about people you resent or people you’ve had really bad relationships with, the idea that if they could become skillful in their actions is not such a bad idea. Now, part of your mind may say, “Well, I’d like to see them suffer a little bit first, so that they could have a taste of what they’ve … 
  17. You Can’t Relax Your Way to Awakening
     … In fact, he says one of the advantages of getting the mind into concentration with a sense of well-being is that it helps get you past some of the pain and hardships involved in developing skillful qualities. Unskillful qualities aren’t the only ones that involve pain. Sometimes skillful qualities do—or the act of trying to develop them is going to be … 
  18. Your Duty Lies Right Here
     … Appropriate is when you see things in terms of the four noble truths and their duties, or on a more basic level, seeing things in terms of whether they’re skillful actions or unskillful actions. Then, if they’re skillful, how can you develop them? If they’re unskillful, how can you abandon them? This gets further elaborated in the four noble truths, with … 
  19. You Can’t Clone Awakening
     … If you recognize that a thought has come from an unskillful intention, you hold it in check and try to replace it with something that comes from a more skillful intention, until the skillful intention becomes more and more habitual. From there, the mind is in a better position to start getting into good states of concentration. This is how the path factor of … 
  20. A Path Rooted in Desire
     … As for skillful qualities, if they’re not there, you generate desire to give rise to them. As for skillful qualities that are there, you generate the desire to develop them to their consummation. In fact, the whole path is a path of desire. The Buddha takes the strategies by which we approach any earnest desire we might have and gives a right version … 
  21. Happy to Be Here
     … If they were driven by skillful motivations, he’d let them, as he said, roam around. But there comes a point where thinking, even in skillful ways, gets tiring for the mind. That was when he was ready to settle down and be still. That first exercise, dividing thoughts into two sorts and resolving to keep away from the unskillful ones and to promote … 
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