Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- The Joy of Renunciation… Then use whatever skills you have—the mind’s skills for fabricating things, which are already good at fabricating defilements: Convert those skills to fabricating motivation to practice the Dhamma, to finding joy in the Dhamma, joy in investing in the long-term. As the Buddha said, delight in the Dhamma, delight in abandoning, delight in developing: These are among the forms of delight …
- Work & Play… What is your present intention? Where is it skillful? Where is it not? What can you do to make it more skillful? How can you pare down all the unskillful parts so that you can see the really subtle forms of intention that keep everything together? As you get more skilled at this, you can get to a point of equilibrium where you realize …
- Three Levels of Concentration… It requires skill. If you’re not skillful, working with the pleasure can create pain and the mind won’t want to settle down. But keep working at it again and again, and after a while you’ll develop skill. You do your work, but you work in pleasure. You create an even more agreeable place to stay as you work with the sense …
- Three Noble Truths Versus Four… But then he himself said that the secret to his awakening was being discontent with skillful qualities. Notice that: discontent with skillful qualities—to say nothing of being discontent with unskillful qualities. What he meant, of course, was that if anything unskillful came up in his mind, he would let it go. As for skillful qualities of mind, he wouldn’t be satisfied with …
- Ultimate Reality… what’s skillful, what’s not skillful.” Vajjiya went back and asked the Buddha if that was true, and the Buddha said, “Yes, that was a good answer.” Those two answers basically provide the foundation for what we’re trying to do here. The issue is suffering and how we can put an end to it. And it’s something we do put an …
- The Strength of Heedfulness… You have to store up your knowledge, and part of storing it up is learning that, Yes, you can develop skillful qualities in the mind, and you can abandon unskillful ones—to the point where you’re thinking nothing but skillful things. But all that thinking can be tiring, so the mind needs to rest from time to time. This is how the strength …
- Faith in Awakening… We see into exactly how the mind creates unnecessary suffering, how it can stop, and how it can master all the skills needed to stop. Discernment, in the Buddha’s teaching, is not just knowing things; it’s mastering skills. When we have these skills, especially the skills of discernment, then as Ajaan Lee says, even if you find yourself born with nothing but …
- What Should I Do?… Which means that we see that some actions are skillful and some are not. This is why the Buddha said that skillfulness comes not from any innate goodness of the mind, but from heedfulness. We look around and see how other people are handling situations in their lives and we try to notice who’s doing it well—and then we take them as …
- Damming & Diverting… In other words, take the energy in the emotion and have it flow into something that’s actually skillful, like the skillful practice of concentration or other skillful thoughts outside. If there’s passion, divert the passion into doing your practice well. As you keep the mind in control like this, you begin to get a better sense of what’s going on: how …
- Hold on to Right View… And as for your choices in the future, the more skillful you can make your choices right now, the more likely you’ll be to make skillful choices then. We do this because our choices influence the extent to which we suffer or not. This means we have to be responsible right here. Other people have to be responsible for their choices. We can …
- The Uses of Pleasure… This is one of the skills you’re going to need to deal with the results of past bad actions. It’s easy to understand that it would be necessary to learn how to be with pain and not overcome by it, in case your past bad actions yield in pain. Well, if you’re going to be overcome by pleasure, you’re going …
- A Safe Home… That way, the idea of acting on skillful intentions becomes more attractive, because an immediate sense of well-being comes with it. All too often, the choice in our mind is immediate gratification through acting on unskillful thoughts, or delayed gratification working on skillful ones. And if that’s the only choice, the skillful ones most often lose out. If the mind is hungry …
- Why Now… You’re trying to develop a skill, the skill of being mindful and alert in the present moment. Why do you want to be here? You have two reasons. One is that there’s work to be done in the present moment. Our lives are shaped by our actions. Our actions are shaped by our intentions—by the choices we make. And where and …
- Learning How to Talk to Yourself… What the world would be like if everybody were skillful? We know it’s not going to be the case anytime soon, but tell yourself you’d be really happy to see everybody act in skillful ways. Then be prepared for those who are not going to be skillful. But at least your beginning attitude starts off right, because that beginning attitude is going …
- The Science of Meditation… And the skill in the meditation comes from learning how to anticipate when something is happening that will be skillful or not. If it’s not, what are you going to do to deflect it? If it is skillful, what are you going to do to make sure it really does give its results and that it keeps on giving its results? The only …
- Remember This… The Buddha said to look at the body in and of itself; feelings in and of themselves—“feelings” here meaning feelings of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain; mind-states, which is where moods, emotions, and opinions all come in; and then mental qualities—specific mental qualities that are skillful or unskillful and go into making up mind-states. In each of these …
- Take Down Your Sails… The amount of time, the amount of strength, the talents we have, the skills we’ve developed: There’s only so much we can do. Now we’re working on the skills in the mind so that we can expand our range. But that means we have to devote a lot of time to this project and let a fair number of things go …
- Right Resolve & Right Speech… So what’s the connection? Part of it may have been because right resolve leads naturally into right concentration, but to get the mind ready to be concentrated you need to develop some skills, and one of the important skills is learning how to talk to yourself. A good way of getting practice in how to talk to yourself is looking at your speech …
- Study & Practice… And learning how not to suffer requires a lot of skill. So when you find yourself running out of strategies, it’s useful to look and see what the Buddha had to say, what the ajaans had to say. You find as you practice that you go through rhythms. There’ll be times when you’re exploring inside, developing skill, and you don’t …
- Mindful of Karma… You see the dangers of unskillful qualities, the dangers of allowing unskillful qualities to take over the mind, and the dangers that come when you don’t develop skillful qualities to take their place. Ardency is a function of right effort. It also means that you really do try to replace the unskillful qualities with something more skillful, that you don’t just sit …
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