Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- A Memorial to Your Life… You have a clear sense of what’s skillful, what’s not skillful, and then you motivate yourself to do what’s skillful. Then you reflect. The reflection is basically the intentness and the circumspection with which you do this. Those are the other two bases for success. ** You really give this your full attention: That’s intentness. Other things will come along and …
- Question Your Defilements… So gradually he was able to hone his doubts down to questions that were really helpful, i.e., “What’s skillful? What’s not skillful? How do I look at my thinking, not in terms of what I believe or don’t believe, but in terms of what actually happens as a result of following a particular thought, following a particular idea?” That question …
- Endurance with a Purpose… There’s an input that comes in from the senses, but we also have our intentions and our skills in how to put things together. Meditation is basically learning a lot of good skills for putting the present moment together in a skillful way. There are basically three components to any mood that stays in the mind. The Buddha calls them fabrication, and there …
- Help Others, Help Yourself… Is it something skillful? Is it something not? Is it going to help the concentration or get in the way? You’ve had some experience with meditation, so you should be able to remember you’ve learned and then apply those lessons here. That’s what mindfulness is all about: remembering, recognizing things. But it’s an active memory, not just sitting here thinking …
- Intelligent about Change… Its actual duty is to actively give rise to things that are skillful and to help unskillful things pass away more quickly. This is what you’ve got to remember. Right mindfulness deals with the things you need to keep in mind as you try to develop skillful qualities and abandon unskillful ones. If something skillful comes up in the mind, you don’t …
- Bases for Success… But everything else, good or bad, skillful or unskillful, has to start with desire. Then out of that desire grows your persistence, the effort you put into the practice, to keep at it. Again, the effort doesn’t have to be the kind where you’re sitting there straining and sweating and wearing yourself out. It means simply learning how to stick with each …
- 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 …
- Large-hearted… Too many people say, “I’ll aim high only if it’s easy,” or “I want the easiest path.” There was an article one time called, “The Physical Genius.” It talked about people who had developed manual skills, physical skills. And one of the signs of being really excellent at a particular skill is just that: enjoying the challenges. So find joy in what …
- 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 …
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