Search results for: "Skillfulness"
- Page 96
- Mindful All the Way… As you train the mind in this direction, it’ll be more and more likely that, as you go through life, it’ll maintain these skills. However, they can be lost, so you have to be careful not to get heedless. This is one of the reasons why, when people are approaching death, the people around them in Thailand try to remind them of …
- What’s Important… doing what you know is skillful and having trust in the Buddha when he says that it is skillful. Whether it shows its results immediately or it takes time, that’s not the issue. This is why the teaching does require conviction. When we read that its aim is the end of passion and desire, that may seem discouraging. But, actually, there’s a …
- Shame Yes, Guilt No… You get more and more used to thinking in skillful ways, more and more used to seeing the times when you really stick with the precepts where you hadn’t before as a victory, and you take joy in that. This is when you learn how to enjoy the training: that you can keep it alive and you’re more likely to get quicker …
- Clinging… Remember that you’re learning a skill here as you meditate that you don’t use just while you’re meditating. It’s useful in all circumstances: You can focus on something and disperse the tension wherever you’re focused. It may be because of this reason that some people object to the idea of calling samadhi “concentration,” because they think concentration has to …
- To Get Ourselves… This relates to the Buddha’s statement that discontent with skillful qualities was the secret to his awakening. In other words, contentment is not a blanket principle of putting up with whatever comes by, both outside and inside. With things outside, you learn how to adapt. If it’s good enough to practice, it’s good enough. With things inside, though, if anything unskillful …
- Guarded… What are the skills that that person has mastered? What are that person’s ways of looking at things? And as you pick those up, you find your attitude changing as well. This way, you learn how to think in ways that undercut any bitterness or irritation or sense of being threatened by people or situations outside. Because a lot of times it’s …
- Quiet in the Midst of Turmoil… He realized that he wasn’t as skilled as he thought he was. So he had to go back and work on the skills of being quiet in the midst of unquiet places. The Canon talks about this a lot. It uses a lot of images. There’s the image of a man with a bowl of oil on his head. The bowl is …
- The Gift of Goodwill… When you act on skillful intentions with right view, the results are going to be good. The results may come slowly, but they’re going to come. If you act on unskillful intentions and wrong view, believing that your actions don’t matter, then the results are going to be bad. It was seeing that larger pattern that the Buddha was able to come …
- Truths of the Will… Whatever skill is needed to pull away from any disturbances, any hindrances, any distractions, you apply that skill. You keep at it. Of course, truths of the observer require a certain amount of will for you to know them. In other words, if you don’t want to know these things, you’re not going to conduct the experiments to find them. Similarly with …
- What You Sense Directly… So you’ve got unskillful causes, the different kinds of craving, and skillful causes, the different factors of the path, and then the results of those two. That gives you the four noble truths. That right there is enough, because these truths point you to what you’re doing right now and where you may want to look to improve what you’re doing …
- Joyous Endurance… And again, the best way to offer them protection is to let them know what skillful action is and encourage them in developing skillful karma. So these things are the right directions you want to go in. But you want to make sure you don’t get deflected by attractive sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, or painful sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations …
- An Auspicious Birth… You want to be clear on the fact that you want to keep your focus on what you’re doing right now—that’s what your present karma is—and make sure that it’s skillful because the other things, whether they’re good or bad, are karmicly neutral. Painful feelings can come up. Pleasurable feelings can come up. Painful emotions, desires: These are …
- The Sport of Wise People… Because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to develop skill. You read about people who are really good at a particular sport or a particular instrument. They learn all the basic steps, but then they use their imagination to figure out how they can be better—and to figure out what things might be done with that skill that …
- Chanting Before Meditation… If something skillful comes up, you remember to encourage it. Again, you’re learning to think in terms of that framework—the search for a happiness that doesn’t die. The word skillfulness relates to whatever leads in that direction. Unskillful is what leads away, causes harm, put limits on the mind, puts limits on the happiness you can find. So keep that perspective …
- Becoming… And no matter how skillful you are at building an elaborate house with lots of gingerbread and balconies and whatever, it’s still frozen meat and it’s going to thaw. So when you develop dispassion for what’s come to be, you find true freedom. You stop this process of fabricating, building, creating states of being. You don’t have to destroy the …
- Ask Yourself the Buddha’s Question… That’s what’s really special about the Buddha, not only that he was trying very carefully to make his actions more skillful, but that he was also very demanding in what he was going to accept as a desirable result, a result that he could be content with. Sometimes we hear about meditation as being all about accepting, accepting, accepting. Well, the things …
- Right but Wrong… After all, the whole point of teaching about kamma is to realize there are actions that are skillful, actions that are unskillful, and actions that are mixed. If you were to say that all action ends in stress, then why bother with skillful actions? It defeats the purpose of that particular teaching. As for the teaching on all feelings being inconstant, stressful, not-self …
- A Position of Strength… If your actions are going to be skillful, they have to come from a place where the mind can consider things carefully, clearly, and quickly. The more the mind is still, the more it’s able to do these things. Above all else, the mind needs strength, and it gathers its strength from meditation. When you sit here with the breath, tell yourself that …
- No Who or Where… Try to put them together in a skillful way, but keep it on the level of events as best you can. This is a state of becoming that we’re creating as we get the mind into concentration, but the more you can keep it at the level of events, it’s a transparent* *becoming. You get to see the process as it’s …
- Sanity for the Holidays… It’s from your family that you learn how to speak, how to walk—all your basic skills that you now take for granted. So when members of the family are difficult, remind yourself that you do have a debt of gratitude to them. That makes it easier to put up with some of the outrageous things that people will do and say. In …
- Load next page...
