Search results for: "Skillfulness"

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  2. The Best News in the World
     … As he said, his quest was the quest for what is skillful. Whatever was skillful, he would do his best to develop it. He wouldn’t content himself with second best. Whatever was unskillful, he would do his best to abandon it. And as he said, in later years, when he abandoned something, he really abandoned it for good. Then resolution: Once he took … 
  3. Everything You Need
     … Ardency is your desire to abandon what’s unskillful and develop what’s skillful in its place. That’s where the discernment lies—in other words, realizing that you can learn, that you can apply your knowledge, and wanting to do that. Not all desire is bad. The desire to be skillful is something you want to encourage, something you want to identify with … 
  4. Joy & Discontent
     … But there’s another place where he says that the secret to his awakening was discontent with his skillful qualities. In other words, as long as he hadn’t attained the deathless happiness that he was looking for, he wouldn’t rest content. So which is it? The answer, of course, is both. Knowing the right time and the right place to encourage yourself … 
  5. Taming the Elephant
     … Some people say that jhana is not absorption, that it’s simply learning how to think skillful thoughts consistently. Well, the Buddha says that’s how you start getting the mind into jhana, by thinking skillful thoughts consistently about the breath. But in the next step, as I said, you’re keeping track of the breath, yet you’re not thinking thoughts about the … 
  6. Mastering Causality
     … After all, this is a skill. That’s another one of the Buddha’s great discoveries. The ability to learn the path to liberation is a skill you can master in the same way that you master other skills: looking at the results of your actions, reflecting back on what you did, and trying to adjust things so that they keep getting more and … 
  7. A Seeker’s Habits
     … And as with any tool, the more you work with them, the more skillful you become. The more skillful you become, the more you see. So even though this does require work—and often it requires really heavy, heavy effort—still it’s all worthwhile. And it’s all a way of showing true goodwill for yourself, true compassion for yourself. Always keep that … 
  8. Talking Among Your Selves
     … Then, as you learn how to talk to yourself in more skillful ways and ask more skillful questions about what’s going on, you can finally turn the questions on the commentator, turn the questions on the consumer and the producer. Turn the questions on: Who is this asking the questions? Who is this that’s giving the orders? When you find that you … 
  9. Appreciating the State of Peace
     … And the actions are incumbent on us if we, as the Buddha said, “are skilled in aims and appreciate the state of peace.” In other words, we appreciate that the true goal is expressed in the third noble truth: the ending of passion for our craving and, as a result, the end of suffering. This is where we aim if we’re “skilled in … 
  10. Frustrated Desires
     … We have our desires—plural—and some of them are more skillful than others. Take advantage of that fact. Use skillful thoughts and desires to overcome unskillful ones. In other words, wean yourself away from unskillful ones. One way is by having a sense that it is possible to go beyond aging, illness, and death. But it’s also important that the path give … 
  11. Trustworthy Intentions
     … Try to give rise to a skillful intention and see what that stirs up in the mind. Sometimes you’ll find some alternative intentions, not so skillful, that were hiding out under the surface. It’s good to know that they are there. Even though they complicate things, at least you know they’re there, so that you can deal with them. Other times … 
  12. Expanded Possibilities
     … He looked first at skills: What can a human being do? Then, in the course of mastering the skills, in the course of training the mind, he looked at what you can learn about the mind, and what you can come to know. He found that there’s something deathless that can be attained through human effort. He looked back and realized that if … 
  13. Being Right
     … You have to be right in a skillful way—in the same way that your intentions can’t just be good intentions, they have to be skillful intentions. Take that as a challenge. And you want to be up for the challenge, convincing yourself that there is a worthwhile skill to be learned here and you can do it. It may take time. You … 
  14. Constructing & Deconstructing
     … He says that this insight is penetrative, and when he talks about penetrative, it means seeing distinctions, and especially the distinction of what’s skillful, what’s not skillful: What has an effect on what. In other words, what’s a cause, what’s an effect, and what are good causes, and what are bad causes? As he goes on to say, this is … 
  15. Actualizing Your Potentials
     … In fact, the desire to get rid of unskillful qualities and the desire to encourage skillful qualities are part of the path, under right effort. We’re not here just watching things coming and going, arising and passing away, in a passive way. We want to understand arising and passing away so that we can figure out the unskillful qualities that keep coming back … 
  16. A Blameless Happiness
     … In other words, you pass along the skills where they can look after themselves. So as long as the happiness you’re looking for doesn’t involve any of those forms of harm, it’s fine. But that’s just the first test. The second test is: What impact does this particular pleasure or form of happiness have on your mind? Think about restraint … 
  17. A Refuge from Modern Values
     … Ask yourself: “Do you want to be in a race with a lot of rats?” You see this reflection filling the literature on wilderness, yet it often happens that people who go into the wilderness and think about this for a while, don’t have the skills required to maintain that wilderness attitude when they return to society. This is one of the things … 
  18. Action & Result
     … They’re all about action and result; skillful action, unskillful action. How do you develop skillful qualities? How do you abandon unskillful ones? Or questions of: How do you develop the path? How do you do the duties of the four noble truths? How do you comprehend suffering to the point where you have no more passion for it? We don’t usually like … 
  19. The Noble Truth about Craving
     … As he said, “All dhammas are rooted in desire,” and that term, “all dhammas,” includes the path, includes both skillful and unskillful dhammas. But the desires that lead to states of becoming: Those are the troublemakers, because they require that we change, and that the world around us will have to change as well. If you have a desire on the level of sensuality … 
  20. Present-Moment Intelligence
     … They’re about actions, either skillful or unskillful. The skillful actions would be following the path; unskillful would be going for the three kinds of craving. Then there are results. That’s what the Buddha wants us to see. Not only that, how can we move from the three kinds of craving to developing the path? It’s going to require some desire. You … 
  21. An Inner Revolution
     … Because the skillful sides of the mind are getting empowered, and the healthy energies in the the body get empowered. The parts that work against the skillful side get disempowered. And then even the skillful sides of the body and mind get overthrown when things open to the deathless. It’s like a velvet revolution—nobody gets killed, but things get radically changed.
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