Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Judging Your Meditation… But unless you recognize a session that goes well and a session that doesn’t go so well, you’re never going to develop the meditation as a skill—and that’s what it is. It is a skill and you’ve got to learn how to judge it—but you have to learn how to judge it wisely. Maybe one of the reasons …
- Fabrication… The path is a process of taking things that are stressful — these perceptions, these feelings, these processes of creation — and using them in a skillful way. So you use fabrication to undo fabrication and then finally reach a point where everything opens up to the unfabricated. It’s an extremely skillful path, a skillful approach. It takes the raw materials that we’ve got …
- Wind, Fire, Water, Earth, Space… Actually, introducing the idea of skillfulness to ethics would be a very useful thing—a very skillful thing—because it makes the point that, on the one hand, mere good intentions are not enough. They have to be skillful to get genuinely good results. On the other hand, the idea of skillfulness emphasizes the extent to which you can learn from your actions and …
- The Wisdom of Dualities… He defines it as making distinctions, seeing the difference between, as he says, bright states of mind and darkened states of mind, skillful states and unskillful states. I remember reading a footnote given by a translator of that passage who was perplexed by it. He said, “This is supposed to be the discernment faculty, and yet it talks about skillful and unskillful actions.” I …
- Right View about Right View… Udayin, who’s a regular troublemaker in a lot of the suttas says, “Well, maybe he was thinking about the fact that actions give rise to feelings, and feelings are stressful.” The Buddha said, “This is not the context for that.” When you talk about action, you’re talking about skillful and unskillful, and you want to induce people to do skillful actions, so …
- Feelings Not of the Flesh… Eventually you can wean yourself away from that attachment, but in the beginning you need that kind of attachment to pry yourself away from attachments that are less skillful. You have to get skilled at giving rise to it so that you have something better to hold onto than the old, run-of-the-mill sensual pleasures that rule your life otherwise. Right here …
- A Haven for Inner Wealth… Then there’s learning, i.e., learning from the Dhamma, which gives you ideas about what’s skillful, what’s not skillful, and how to develop what’s skillful, and abandon what’s not. And there’s generosity: realizing that you have more than enough. In other words, through your good intentions you’ve been creating lots of good things, and you can share …
- A Noble Path… We can’t go out and save other beings, because we’re each suffering from our own lack of skill. So each of us has to develop that skill. You can’t make others skillful. You can provide them with an example and give advice. But for the actual care and attention, mindfulness, alertness, and all the other qualities that are needed to develop …
- Refuge in an Admirable Friend… In other words, you learn to find joy in the fact that you’re getting more and more skillful. But at the same time, you realize that as long as your skills are not on the ultimate level, there’s more to do. So, it’s a combination of taking joy, but then saying, “Okay, I’ve got to work harder next time.” You …
- Cleanliness is Next to Mindfulness… We don’t have many physical skills; we haven’t learned the mental qualities that go with developing a physical skill. So we’ve got to go back and learn them from scratch. This is why the training is not just a matter of sitting and walking; it’s a whole lifetime. All the things you do throughout the day are opportunities to develop …
- The Quest for Inner Happiness… You’re not here to judge yourself as a person, you’re here simply to learn a new skill. Be more skillful in how you approach the question of how to be happy right now, how to feel ease, a sense of rapture and fullness right now that doesn’t impose anything on anyone else—a totally blameless happiness. So as you sit here …
- Working Hypotheses… That means you have to develop skill, which is what we’re working on right now. So he’s basically saying that your development of skill is what’s going to make the difference between your happiness or lack of happiness in life. We take that principle on trust. Some of the other details may be a little bit more than we can get …
- Anapanasati Day… This makes you more and more sensitive to the qualities in the mind, the qualities that help make the mind skillful—in particular, skillful in dealing with the breath—and the qualities that make it unskillful. As you focus on the breath, you find the all the frames of reference are here. There’s the body, of which the breath is a part, and …
- Audacious & Undaunted… Other people did things that were skillful but went to hell. So those people said, “Your actions had no bearing at all on your next rebirth.” Then the Buddha looked into the issue and he saw that things were not as simple as all that. Both sides were too simplistic. He saw there were cases where people did skillful things and went to heaven …
- Tranquility & Insight… You want to master this skill, because you see that it’s useful. Those little pains that come up in the meditation: Sometimes they’re not so little, but they’re nothing compared to the bigger pains we’re going to meet with later in life. So you want to be prepared. You want to have a range of skills to deal with them …
- Duties… As they become skills, you find that they do a better and better job of uprooting the causes of whatever suffering you’ve been experiencing, and getting you past the suffering. They’re good tasks, good skills to develop. No one’s forcing you, aside from the fact that there’s suffering breathing down your neck all the time if you don’t. But …
- The Power of Intention… It’s what pulls mindfulness and alertness into the right orbit focused on your skillful and unskillful intentions. What should be done about them? You try your best to develop the skillful ones and abandon the unskillful ones. And in so doing, you bring the mind into concentration. Here, too, you’re paying attention to your intentions. How is the breath going? How do …
- A Gift of Strength… And it stands to reason that if intentions come out of a strong mind—well-balanced, wise, compassionate, mindful—then those intentions will be a lot more skillful, the life they shape will be a much better life. So the teachings on karma are not irrelevant to the practice of meditation. They point to you why you need to meditate and where you have …
- Self-Reliance… Ardency is the whole-hearted desire and effort to be as skillful as you can in what you do. It’s this principle of skillfulness that translates into appropriate attention. In other words, skills depend on there being cause and effect, and on the fact that some causes are productive of results that are better than others: more pleasant in the long term, less …
- Determination… So why is it that we don’t get all the things we want? It’s because our desires pull in so many different directions, some of them skillful, some of them not. And when we focus on what we want, we don’t usually think about what the long-term consequences will be, so often the long term turns out bad. One of …
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