Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism Podcast.

This is episode number 114. I am your host Noah Rosheta, and today I'm going to talk about falling rocks.

Keep in mind you don't need to use what you learned from Buddhism to be a Buddhist.

You can use this to learn to be a better whatever you already are.

Before we get going to have a little bit of housekeeping, I want to give you a quick reminder about language.

It's common when learning about Buddhism to hear words like skillful and unskilful being used when referring to aspects of the Buddhist path.

This comes from a Sanskrit expression that is common in Buddhism.

The expression in English is skillful in means. Skillful means is a concept that emphasizes that a Buddhist practitioner may use his or her own methods or techniques on the path to enlightenment, depending on his or her own specific set of circumstances.

The Buddha was known for adapting his teachings to a specific person or audience that he was addressing and taking into account the listener's specific needs and skill level.

In this way, we can adapt Buddhist practices to conform to our own individual needs and circumstances.

This is considered skillful means.

Now considering the idea of skillful means and last week's podcast episode, I spoke about the idea of right speech, one of the eight fold, one of the spokes on the eight fold path.

I want to remind you that first, these ideas that I share about eye messages, they're just meant to be tools to help you to be more skillful with your communication.

Communication that is formatted in the eye message formula, that doesn't mean in and of itself that that is skillful speech. It's just a tool.

And any tool can be misused or abused.

And if someone were to take advantage of the eye message format and used it to try to manipulate their listener to act a certain way, then that is certainly not right speech.

So keep this idea of skillful means in mind anytime you're learning about Buddhist concepts or ideas or teachings and especially keep this in mind when I'm sharing something on this podcast.

Nothing I share is meant to be authoritative in the way of a final way of saying this is the way.

It's only meant to be shared as another way of thinking here's another way away. This is a way of thinking of things. It's not the way of thinking of things.

So right speech is a very broad topic that could be talked about for hours upon hours and probably have an entire book written about it.

And what I shared in one short podcast episode last week is not meant to be the definition or the definitive way of understanding what right speech is.

The whole goal of what what I was trying to share is this is a tool it may work for you in your circumstances. It may not.

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