Search results for: "Skillfulness"
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- Responsible for Your Actions… The same thing with figuring out what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in the mind: You’ve got to get the mind as clear as possible, as still as possible, to see clearly, operating on the principles of conviction in your actions and right view about what you want to look for in terms of what the problem is inside the mind i …
- Push Yourself… And the stress of skillful qualities is not there. Notice the implication of that: that developing skillful qualities will sometimes involve stress. But when you finally can master all the obstreperous voices in your mind, all the lazy voices in your mind, and gain some well-being that comes through the mastery of the mind, that’s when you’ve deserved your rest. That …
- A Graduated Discourse… It’s remembering what’s skillful and what’s not skillful, so that when you recognize what’s coming up through your alertness, you’ve got a framework for deciding what should be done. Ardency is what then tries to do it. So, right now we see that the mind wandering around is in a place of danger and the mind that settles down …
- Near to the Buddha… If you let go of unskillful things, skillful things will come in and take their place. As the Buddha said, loss of friends and relatives is not all that serious. Loss of wealth is not that serious. Even loss of your health is not that serious. The serious losses are when you lose your right views and when you lose your virtue. With things …
- Straightening the Arrow… Some people complain that all this effort we do—judging what’s skillful and unskillful, being careful about the friends you keep, being careful about restraint of the senses—doesn’t seem very enlightened. Well, you can’t clone awakening. The path is not the same as awakening. The path is a process you have to put the mind through in order to come …
- Looking after Yourself with Ease… In the same way, you try to look for the goodness in the other person because it’s water for your goodness, so that you’ll be motivated to act in a skillful way. If you don’t see any good at all in anybody else, you get careless in your actions. So try to look and have a sense that you need that …
- Respect for the Triple Training… Often, it’s not the case that we don’t know what’s skillful; it’s just that in the heat of the moment we forget, we push it out of our minds. And that’s not showing respect for discernment. So the training is there. It’s been laid out. The Buddha discovered it. It had been lost by people before him, and …
- Building on Certainty… You need a basic skill for sorting out what’s really useful and how far is it useful and what’s not useful at all. So the Buddha’s test comes down to some very simple and immediate things. Look at the mind in the present moment, look what it’s doing. In other words, look for its intentions. Look to see how much …
- Cleansing the Mind… When you have this attitude, then you can trust that no matter who you deal with, you will deal with in a skillful way. This is what you want to be able to trust: that you’ll act skillfully regardless of the circumstances. You have to maintain your sense of honor. You might say, “Well, because so-and-so did something bad, that gives …
- A Mind Without Inertia… One is to direct the passion in a skillful direction, learning to get the mind motivated for things that really are helpful, that really do lead to a truly lasting happiness. For the most part, our passions are totally misguided. So the Buddha said to focus your passion in the direction of the Dhamma. Find the happiness that comes from generosity, the happiness that …
- Focus on What You’re Doing… This is one of the ways in which you take the skills you develop on the cushion and learn how to use them in the thick of the battle. That way, when you’re sitting here meditating, it’s not simply the case that you sit here with your eyes closed, and everything just settles down—or that you simply wait for things to …
- Grasping the Snake… You’re trying to develop a skill here, which means that you look at the qualities coming up in the mind not only while you sit here with your eyes closed but also as you go through the day. To what extent do you allow anger to come in and take charge? To what extent do you allow greed to come in, or feelings …
- Dissolving Your Thoughts… An important part of the skill in learning how to meditate is developing that sense of balancing and then compensating when something has knocked you off kilter. Here again, this ability to sense the thought as a disturbance in the breath energy in the body is really helpful because, after all, you’re with the breath already, and you don’t have to change …
- Conditions for Concentration… When the talk mentions developing skillful qualities, okay, you work on those. You begin to see that they’re giving results. That, too, can give rise to joy. As the mind settles down, you get into concentration. That multiplies the joy, deepens the concentration, makes it more and more the kind of concentration that’s appropriate for going deeper into the mind, developing the …
- Cheating the System… That’s the skill the Buddha’s trying to teach us. And it’s a skill we can all learn.
- Question Your Actions… And you’re talking to yourself about this: “How’s this breath? How’s the next breath? Where does it feel good in the body? Where does the breath feel clear in the body?” These are all questions worth asking, because they help develop a skill. They also make you more sensitive the extent to which you’re shaping your experience right now. These …
- Food, Shelter & Work… As he said, at the very least, replace unskillful pleasures and pains with skillful pleasures and pains. And beyond that, it is possible to breathe in a way that gives rise to pleasure, gives rise even to rapture, feelings of fullness and refreshment. And they’re part of the path. The duty of mindfulness, he says, is actually to give rise to skillful qualities …
- The Cool Fire of Jhana… These are three separate skills. When you’re getting it to settle down, you have to really protect it because it’s like a fire that’s weak. Think about a person trying to start a fire on a windy day. You have a tiny, little match. Of course, back in the time of the Buddha, they didn’t even have matches. They had …
- Friends with The Breath… This is one of the skills of how to pay attention to your breath. It’s like looking at a painting. You can focus on a detail in the painting, but you can also see how the detail relates to everything else in the painting. If your thoughts wander off, just drop them, and you’ll find yourself back at the breath. You don …
- Comprehending Clinging… Other people have decided that sensuality is everything and don’t want to hear about worldviews that would downplay the importance of sensuality, or would raise questions about the skillfulness or unskillfulness of their actions as they search for sensual pleasures. All these ways of clinging, as the Buddha said, are suffering. This means that the strategies we use for figuring out how to …
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