Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Significance… On the one hand, the teaching that skillful actions should be developed and unskillful ones should be abandoned. And then from that, you can draw out the four noble truths and their duties: comprehending suffering, abandoning its cause—the cause there, of course, would be an unskillful action; developing the path, which is a skillful action; and realizing the cessation of suffering. Everything you …
- Patience & Endurance… If the mind is well trained, then it’s going to do things skillfully, to have more skillful intentions—to at least be able to hold its unskillful intentions in check, and to develop more skillful ones in their place. So as we meditate, we’re working on skillful intentions. What’s skillful right now? Try to get the mind to settle down. We …
- Balancing the Bases for Concentration… Insight comes from your ability to look at what you’ve done and to decide whether it’s skillful or not—or, if it’s somewhat skillful, how it might be more skillful. So learn to balance the times when you simply focus on the breath without asking too many questions, aside from asking yourself what kind of breathing would feel good now, and …
- Ready to Evacuate… Or as the passage from the Canon says, “We’re the owners of our actions.” Those are the things you want to hold on to—your actions—in the sense that you want to hold on to your ability to do skillful things, to make skillful choices. So right now the skillful choice is to stay in the present moment. Stay with the object …
- Free Not to Suffer… You commit yourself to doing the skillful thing, and then you reflect on how well you’re doing. It’s in this way that you take advantage of that freedom to choose in the present moment, to choose what you’re going to do. Focus in on doing the most skillful thing possible, and that way you get sensitive to the mind. The mind …
- To Be Trustworthy… So right now you’re ardent to develop only skillful qualities, skillful thoughts around the body, and to abandon unskillful ones. You’re alert to what’s actually going on in the mind with regard to the body. And you keep in mind the determination you want to get the best things out of the body before you have to let it go. The …
- Your Highest Aspiration… Some of them are skillful, some of them are not, and they tend to pull in opposite directions. If someone were to appear in front of you right now and say, “Okay, you have three wishes,” what would you say? What would you wish for? Do you have skillful intentions already well formulated? It’s a huge help to the practice if you can …
- Lift Your Mind… There is a skill that can be developed, but each of us has to develop for him or herself. No one else can make you skillful. You’re the one who has to learn—from trial and error, and being really observant—that you can really lift the quality of your mind. The Buddha’s image for discernment is a person who climbs a …
- A Sucker for Random Memories… Knowing that you face difficulties that are going to be a lot more difficult than, say, a pain that you have to endure while you meditate, requires you to be stricter with yourself about the skills you develop as a meditator. It’s like learning a foreign language. If you plan simply on traveling for a while in a foreign country, you pick up …
- Look after Yourself Happily… The Buddha calls it “I-making and my-making.” And you look through the Canon there are areas where the Buddha says it really is in your interest to be skillful in your I-making and my-making. In the same way, you want to be skillful in figuring out what is not-self. In other words, there are some areas where, if you …
- Mindfulness as Refuge… This relates to another teaching that he has on duties, which is to abandon unskillful qualities in the mind and to develop skillful ones. As he said, it’s through following these duties that you find true happiness and true safety. After all, his definition of true happiness—nibbana—is also a place of supreme safety: no conditions that can change, nothing that can …
- The Third and a Half Noble Truth… The Buddha himself said that the secret to his awakening was that he would not rest content with skillful qualities. What this means is that if the skillfulness in his mind had not reached the level where it put an end to suffering, he would keep working at it more and more. He wouldn’t just stop. This is why he left his first …
- Goodwill Plus… You’re wishing for them to be skillful. You don’t necessarily have to make them skillful. In fact, you can’t. Your only responsibility is that you’re not going to act in a way that’s going to interfere with their becoming skillful or with their true well-being. That’s a good promise to make to yourself, and it’s a …
- A Refuge from the Winds of the World… the discernment that penetrates into what is skillful and what is not skillful in all the things around you, what’s worth following, what’s not worth following. It also covers knowing how to talk yourself into following the things that should be followed, and to let go of the things that should not. All of these qualities make you more dependable inside. You …
- Bases of Success… And the first factor for success is wanting it, desiring it, in a skillful way. In other words, you have to learn some skill in how you apply your wants, how you motivate yourself, and where you focus your desire. You focus your desire on the causes. If you focus simply on the kinds of results you want to get—if you read in …
- Ups & Downs… So think back on skills you’ve developed in the past—related to sports or music or any manual skill—and try to think of the attitude you had toward the times you made a mistake. And particularly, think of the proper attitude to have: the attitude that allows you to try to figure out the mistake and then figure out another way of …
- Clinging, Addictions, Obsessions… As for the doctrines of the self, that’s also related to right view, and in particular to your sense of who you are in relationship to the kinds of pleasure you like to think about, the skills you have. For most of us, addictive behavior comes from a lack of alternative skills. But if you practice the alternative skills, you become a new …
- Things Aren’t as They Should Be… But you don’t just let it sit there and say, “Well, that’s just the way it’s got to be.” That’s what you’re presented with, but you can learn skills to deal with what’s coming up in the present moment and to handle it well. If you don’t have the skills, then no matter what good things are …
- Seclusion… Here you’re trying to develop a new kind of skill: the skill of making up your mind to stay with one thing and really following through with that. This is the sort of thing that you should learn how to do not only while you’re here at the monastery, but also as you’re at home. The Buddha talks about the five …
- Relating to Results… And it’s by learning how to apply the principles to the particulars through trial and error that we learn and develop skill. So if we make a mistake, we don’t childishly refuse to admit the mistake. We have enough detachment, enough objectivity, enough maturity to admit our mistakes so that we can learn from them. As for the skillful actions that take …
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