Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Unraveling the Present… That’s basically what our practice is about—developing the skill to find what’s better in the mind. I mentioned this afternoon about how, in the old days back in ancient civilizations, they talked about two kinds of knowledge: scribe knowledge and warrior knowledge—not warrior in the sense of macho, but in the sense of someone who has developed skills to use …
- What We’re Here to See… I talked with an anthropologist once, and he was talking about how the trend in anthropology over the past couple of decades has been that anthropologists going into another culture have to learn the skills of that culture if they’re really going to understand it, which is a wise policy. But he said there’s one skill that no modern anthropologist can master …
- Taking a Stance… We have a whole hour to work at this skill, a skill that you don’t leave here when the hour is up, but that you take with you. It becomes the basic pattern for how you relate to the body, how the mind relates to itself. It cuts through a lot of the unnecessary stress and frustration, unnecessary turmoil in the mind. So …
- The Size of Your Eyes… Skillful causes or skillful actions, like the path, lead to a desirable result: the end of suffering. They’re all about doing. When we do mindfulness practice, the qualities we develop are ardency, alertness, and mindfulness—and the wisdom is there in the ardency: trying to do it right, figuring out what’s skillful, what’s unskillful and how to do the skillful thing …
- Gladdening the Mind… This is an important skill in the meditation. The Buddha lists it as one of the basic steps in mindfulness of breathing. If your meditation gets dry, it starts to seize up like an engine without any lubricant. So you need to keep your mind lubricated, keep it refreshed as you’re practicing. There are lots of different ways of doing this. Ajaan Lee …
- Training the Mind… An important part of the skill of meditation is in how you come back. If you come back with a sense of frustration or irritation, you’re not going to get far in the meditation. You have to be patient. The mind wanders off; you bring it back. It wanders off again; you bring it back again. Just keep this up. Be persistent without …
- The Karma of Pain… That makes it harder and harder to do skillful karma in the present. So what you’ve got to learn how to do is to be skillful in how you put things together. Because that’s your karma right here, right now. And all the Buddha’s teachings—on the four noble truths, on the aggregates and particularly the teaching on past and present …
- Attachment to Views… So we’re learning a skill here, and this is why the training is an apprenticeship. It’s not just a series of books that you read or exams you can take. It’s a training of the whole person, so that you can get sensitive to the skills and the levels of skill and see what works in what kind of situation and …
- Five Steps to Insight… It’s like any skill. At first you’re happy that you’re able to just do the skill at all. But then you get so that you want to do it in more and more refined ways. You get more sensitive to the things that get in the way of doing it really smoothly, really gracefully, doing it really well. The difference here …
- An Enduring Cheerfulness… Instead, you hope that by working on skillful qualities, you’ll get more and more skillful. Perhaps “hope” is not quite the right word, but it’s a confidence that this path is something you can do. You’ll benefit, the people around you will benefit, so it’s worth doing. That right there should be cause enough for cheerfulness. That, and the realization …
- The Pursuit of Happiness & Goodness… This requires mindfulness, ardency, alertness—all the qualities you need to develop a skill. That right there makes you a different person. Because when you develop a skill, you have to develop patience, you have to have a clear view of cause and effect, you have to think strategically, and there are a lot of things you have to give up in order to …
- Learn from Your Mistakes… But his whole attitude, all the way throughout his quest for awakening, was that there must be something skillful. He characterized his quest as the search for what is skillful, in other words, a path of action, a course of action that would lead to the deathless, that would lead to what he called “the rest from the yoke,” the ability to take off …
- In Times of Danger and Fear… As the Buddha said, the task of mindfulness, when you put mindfulness in charge, is to give rise to skillful states, get rid of unskillful states, and if skillful states are there, you try to maintain them. Let them grow. And how are you going to do that? Well, you find that the way you breathe has an impact. The way you talk to …
- Emotion… So one of the important lessons you need to learn in meditation is how you fabricate an emotion so that you can start fabricating more skillful ones. Again, the idea of a skillful emotion may sound strange. But when you learn that you can consciously direct your emotions and that your emotions do have consequences, you want to direct them in the right direction …
- Be Observant… The path we’re practicing is a skill, and skills take time. You have to be observant, you have to learn from what you’ve observed. Gradually, over time, the skill gets more and more precise, your powers of observation get better and better, until finally you see precisely where you’re causing stress and you don’t have to. The words insight or …
- Fully Absorbed… You want to develop the skills so that you can be equanimous in areas where you can’t make a difference in the world. You want to think in those ways, because while you’re meditating on the breath, other narratives do come up. The brahmaviharas are for reminding yourself that the narratives come back here. Everything should be focused in here right now …
- Heightening the Mind… We’re learning the basic skills we need so that no matter what experience comes to the mind, we don’t fall for it. We don’t latch onto it so that we don’t become a slave to it — for the whole purpose of the practice is freedom and yet the habits of the mind tend toward self-enslavement. Even when great feelings …
- Freedom from Beliefs… It requires a lot of skill and a lot of restraint, and kill and restraint are stressful. Now, this doesn’t mean that we should abandon skill and abandon restraint when we’re dealing with people. That would create more problems. It’s a matter of having a sense of time and place, knowing what to hold onto, knowing what to let go of …
- Strategic Friends… When you couple that with discernment, which is the ability to see cause and effect, and figure out which effects are things you want, which ones are not, which causes are skillful and which ones are not, you find you can really take your life in hand. So you start doing the things that lead to the results you want more and more. This …
- Discernment Performs… Is this a skillful action, or not a skillful action? Don’t get entangled in issues of, “Am I a good person? Am I a person with any hope in the meditation, or am I hopeless?” That’s an unskillful use of judgment. The skillful use involves looking at actions and looking at your state of mind as it’s affected by those actions …
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