Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- In Restraint Is Strength… You try to give rise to skillful qualities, and when they’re there, you try to maintain them. Now, this kind of effort leads naturally to right mindfulness and right concentration. But those are things you can do all day long. In fact, they get better if you do them all day long. Ajaan Fuang’s comment was that we tend to divide the …
- Reflect… You have to learn how to sort things out as to what’s skillful and what’s not. This is the work of that factor of awakening called analysis of qualities. So discernment does require work. It does require us to be discerning, to see the distinction between what’s skillful and what’s not, and particularly to be very sensitive to what we …
- Advice for a New Monk… This is a good skill to have, the ability just to drop all your concerns and let the mind be still for a while. It’s a basic skill for maintaining your sanity, because otherwise the world can drive you crazy. You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that, and you need about 75 hours in a day to take …
- Allies… The skill we’re working on here has been something that has been handed down for the past 2,600 years because it works. The people who found that it works are people of integrity, people we can trust. What we’re doing is learning how to use this skill to become trustworthy people, people of integrity, ourselves. So try to start the meditation …
- The Buddha’s Revolution… learning to give rise to skillful qualities and abandon unskillful qualities, and putting an effort in to do that well. These are the areas where the Buddha says you look for freedom. In terms of shedding and contentment, think of that story of the former king, Bhaddiya, who was one of the Buddha’s relatives and became a monk. He goes out to sit …
- Friendship Leading to Seclusion… In other words, you use skillful thinking, talking to yourself in skillful ways, to pull yourself away from unskillful thinking. Sensuality is your fascination with sensual fantasies, as when you’re thinking about sex, thinking about food. The narratives of those kinds of fantasies can really pull you in. So you have to reflect on them: What are these fantasies made of? To what …
- The Challenge of Right View… What that means is that we have to learn to be more skillful, to follow the other path, which is a path to the end of suffering. No one else can make us skillful. We have to develop skill on our own. The Buddha once said that there are two sources for awakening. One is the voice of another person, the advice you get …
- True Values… If you act with skillful intentions, the results are going to be good. You’re convinced of that. If you act with unskillful intentions, the results are going to be bad. This is very different from what the world tells us. Success in their eyes can often come from being very devious. But the Buddha says genuine success, genuine well-being, requires that you …
- The Door of the Cage… And he gives you a sense of which actions are skillful within the context of that world. So it’s a worldview designed to be focused on action. The same with views of the self,** **who you are: His provisional view is simply that you are responsible and you’re capable, that you’re competent to follow the path and you will benefit from …
- The Intelligence of Restraint… All four of these are guided by right view, because right view tells you what’s skillful, what’s not skillful, and it alerts you to the possibility of a true happiness: something that lies outside of conditions. We’re not here simply to find peace and well-being within conditions. As the Buddha said, “Nibbana lies outside of conditions. It’s unfabricated.” That …
- The Brahmaviharas on the Path… Just keep asking yourself, “What’s the skillful thing to do now?” Try to bring some sense of ease with the breath into all your other activities. It’ll make it easier to do the skillful thing and step back from unskillful mind states that pop up, where you get upset, where you get flustered, angry, whatever. You’ll develop more resistance to those …
- The Dualistic Path… So this ability to discern stress and the ending of stress is something you have to develop over time until it becomes a skill. It requires all the powers of observation, focus, mindfulness, and alertness that any skill requires. It shows its worth in a temporary way as you catch sight of a particular habit in the mind that’s causing stress, and you …
- Endurance… But there is a skill you can develop so that inside is always well. And meditation is part of that skill. You’re going to be looking at your own mind as the mind is looking at the breath. In the beginning, you want to pay most attention to the breath, and pay attention to the mind mainly when it’s not with the …
- The Energy in the Body… What you want to do is learn how to read your experience, get a sense of what’s skillful and what’s not, because this is the basis for the four noble truths. Skillful action, desirable result, unskillful action, undesirable result: Those are the basic parameters of the four truths. You have to develop your sensitivity as to what really is desirable and what …
- Desire… It’s about generating desire to let go of unskillful states that have arisen, to prevent unskillful states that haven’t arisen from coming into being, generating desire to give rise to skillful mental states, and to develop them when they have arisen. What you’re doing is that you’re taming desire. You’re learning to direct your desires in the right direction …
- Noble Contentment, Noble Discontent… But then there’s another one where he says it was because he didn’t allow himself to stay content with his skillful qualities that he was able to attain awakening. This means we have to figure out: Where does contentment apply, and where does it not? It applies basically to your physical surroundings—the things you have and use. When the Buddha talks …
- Fourth Truth, First Duty… These are skills you can carry with you as you go through the rest of the day. There are times when you’re engaged in other work, and it may be too much to be engaged in the work and have a sense of when the breath is coming in, when the breath is going out, but you can have a general sense of …
- Straightening Out the World… In other words, if you can replace the defilement with a more skillful state of mind, then you can prevent yourself from acting in a defiled way. This is why mindfulness and alertness are so important. You see what’s happening and you realize, “This is not going to be skillful,” so you stop. Or even better, if you can begin to get to …
- Mindfulness Like a Dam… If something unskillful comes up, you try to get rid of it, or at least turn it into something skillful. If there’s something skillful there, you try to encourage it. You’re not just letting things arise and pass away on their own. You’re actually trying to give rise to skillful things and make sure they don’t pass away. And, as …
- Solidly Established… These are all really basic mental skills: the ability to keep something in mind, the ability to watch what you’re doing, and then the ability to stick with something that you know is going to help you. Because they’re so basic, we tend to overlook them. Yet anything you do in life requires these mental qualities. So here’s an opportunity to …
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