Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Learning by Doing… He was talking about what can be learned from mastering a skill. And the skill here is learning how to stay with one object consistently. We choose the breath because it’s convenient. You don’t have to buy anything, you don’t have to ask for any secret passwords. It’s right there coming in, going out all the time. It’s the …
- Training Your Inner Teacher… Appropriate attention means looking at your actions while listening to the talk, seeing how the talk applies to your actions, particularly actions that are skillful and unskillful. What does the talk have to say about them? How does it apply to what you’re doing; where your weaknesses are; where your strengths are? Then you can go further, into looking into: What does the …
- Categorical Truths… As is the basic principle that if anything is unskillful in your thoughts, words, and deeds, you should try to abandon it; if anything is skillful, you should try to encourage it, maintain it, let it grow. These truths are true across the board, all the time, for everyone. In terms of the four noble truths, the first one is the truth of suffering …
- Doing Favors & Making Merit… How are you skillful in being generous? Part of the skill is choosing good people to receive your gifts, people who you feel will use them well. Because, remember, what makes you happy? The sense that you’ve given a gift and the person who received it has enough appreciation to want to use it well. There are times when you feel, “Well, so …
- Free for the Time Being… But you do know that if anything difficult comes up, your most important resources will be the skills you build in the mind: your ability to read a situation, to see it clearly, to keep in mind what’s skillful and what’s not. It’s like the precepts. People sometimes complain that they’re hard-and-fast rules. It’s better to think …
- Recollecting the Devas… how he did it by questioning his mind and examining his mind to see what was skillful, what was unskillful, and by having the heedfulness to keep developing what was skillful and abandoning what was not. That relentless cross-questioning he imposed on himself to root out any unskillful behavior, any attachments: That’s how he gained his awakening. To have conviction in that …
- The River Gauge… So you can learn from the ups, learn from the downs, and the meditation becomes more and more of a skill. Not that it’s always going to go well, but that you know how to handle the times when it doesn’t go well—and you know how to handle the times when it does go well. There’s a phrase in Pali …
- Right Now… Ajaan Mun used the word “actionlessness.” That’s the ultimate skill: to bring the mind to the point where it doesn’t need to be skillful anymore. It goes beyond skillfulness, beyond action entirely. But to get there, you have to have a strong sense of the importance of what you’re doing right now. That means letting go of what other people did …
- Looking After Yourself… He said it’s the basis for all skillfulness, the basis for the skillful qualities we need to develop on the path—which means we have to be very careful. On the one hand, the mind does have its own rhythms. There are times when you can’t push it too hard. But at the same time, you have to watch out for that …
- Equanimity Isn’t Apathy… So, the issue lies in getting your mind in a state where it’s willing to learn, where it’s able to observe cause and effect, so you can master the skill. That’s how equanimity functions. It doesn’t mean not caring about what happens. You care, but you also care to learn about cause and effect: what really works in getting the …
- Big Desire, Detailed Focus… But the Buddha says you’ve got to have some discontent with your level of skill if you’re going to get anywhere in the path. What that means is that we take these qualities of desire and discontent and a sense of lack, and we focus them in the right direction. Here it’s getting the mind to settle down. When you’re …
- Purity Comes Through Discernment… Even skillful intentions: There comes a point where you have to let go of what’s skillful as well. That’s when the mind opens up to something else entirely, something that’s outside even the present moment. That’s true liberation, when the mind is truly pure. You get there through discernment and, of course, discernment needs other qualities to help it along …
- Patience & Consistency… How does a mind state form? How do skillful states form? How do unskillful states form? In the case of the skillful ones, you have to stick with them for long periods of time, get them going so that they’re solid and dependable, so that you can understand them. As for the unskillful ones, it takes a lot of good steady concentration so …
- Sending Happiness… You try to figure out new ways of advancing that skill, whatever the skill is on which you base your livelihood. And you try to be untiring and energetic in what you do. You can also interpret this is terms of your meditation practice. Show initiative in your meditation by being clever and untiring. You sit down, and things are not working out well …
- What You Can’t Change, What You Can… When you do something skillful, you can enjoy it. The Buddha says that that’s an important part of the practice. Sometimes we feel embarrassed about looking at our own goodness. But if you’re embarrassed about your goodness, you’re not likely to do any. We’re not doing it to gloat or to compare ourselves with other people. We simply want to …
- Fighting Attitude… This is an important skill, because sometimes they’re not there when you think they are; sometimes they’re there when you think they aren’t. An example of the first case is when you’re angry. The anger flares up and your blood starts racing, your heart starts beating faster. Then the actual thought of anger disappears for a while from the mind …
- No Resistance… Then learn the skill of how to allow the things that you’re not paying attention to occupy the same space, but without your going with them. This will be an especially important skill to develop as you’re moving from concentration into discernment. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about analyzing pain and realizing that pain may occupy the same space as the body does …
- All Winners, No Losers… Find it in being skillful, in your search for happiness in a way that harms no one. Think about the Buddha teaching Rahula. He said, “Look at your actions. Before you do something, ask yourself, ‘Is this going to harm anyone?’ If the action is going to harm them, you don’t do it. If you don’t foresee any harm, you go ahead …
- The Challenge… But as you get skilled in the precepts, you find that the return really is worth much more than what you give up. When you come to meditation with that experience behind you, it’s a lot easier to give up a lot of the things that are really closest to the heart, things inside the mind: your sense of who you are, your …
- Take Nothing for Granted… He talked about how modern-day anthropologists, when they study a tribe, try to master all the different skills that the people of the tribe have mastered so that they can get an inside feel for the culture of the tribe. But one skill they found they had real trouble mastering is hunting, because hunting requires a lot of mental powers: concentration, a purposeful …
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