Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Fear of Death… virtue concentration, discernment; virtue, concentration, discernment. Just have a strong sense that this is the Dhamma you can take as your refuge. You don’t need anything else aside from this. This is your protection against those fears, your protection against the dangers that otherwise await. So do your best to cultivate these three trainings, because they really provide safety.
- Staying True… So when you’ve got the discernment and you’ve got the calming here, it helps the mind to give up all the things that are going to get in the way of its original intention, which is to stay with the breath, to develop these qualities of mindfulness and alertness. This set of qualities—discernment, truthfulness, relinquishment, and calming—are called the four …
- Good Fundamentals… The more experienced the people are in terms of generosity, virtue, conviction, and discernment—particularly discernment into how to put an end to suffering—the more you benefit. What it comes down to is the Buddha’s realization that the Big Problem in life is the suffering we cause, and yet we don’t have to. Why do we cause that suffering? It’s …
- All of a Piece… It’s the last two, the Buddha said, that constitute the measure of your wisdom, the measure of your discernment: your ability to talk yourself into doing the things that you don’t like to do but give good results, and ability to talk yourself out of doing things that you like to do that give bad results. It’s a very down-to …
- Tuning Your Lute… As for the discernment you’re going to gain, you say, “The discernment that comes from maintaining concentration is worthwhile”—because you never know what you’re going to see. Something out of the corner of your eye strikes you that you’ve been doing again and again and again, and you’ve never really noticed it. But maybe for once you will. So …
- The Mind Set Tall… You feel less threatened by the things you learn from discernment. It’s a basic principle that real discernment means seeing your own stupidity, your own lack of honesty with yourself. These are things we don’t want to look at, things we don’t want to see. But it’s what we have to see, what we have to look at, if we …
- Shelter Through Restraint… The Buddha talks about not neglecting discernment, and he means all the time. An important part of discernment is seeing the connections between things. As Ajaan Lee once said, if you see causes without the results, that’s not discernment. If you see results without their causes, that’s not discernment, either. You have to see the connection. So you have to stop and …
- Luminous… He says you start out discerning when the breath is long, discerning when it’s short, training yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to the whole body, and then to breathe in and out calming bodily fabrication. The term bodily fabrication, there, is a technical term—basically, a technical term for the in-and-out breath itself. He notes that bodily fabrication is …
- The Core of Experience… Do you sincerely want to be happy? Do you want to take your desire for happiness as something important? For the Buddha, that’s the beginning of wisdom and discernment: taking your desire for true happiness as having essential value. And then, from the assumption, discernment develops. It develops through asking the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term …
- Mindworms… Then you bring in the discernment members: the ones that can reason, the ones that can see how stupid it is to fall for certain thoughts. They don’t have to use a lot of force. Discernment simply turns on a light inside the mind so that you can see that what was all-obsessing pattern of thought is really very small when you …
- Games the Mind Plays… And that determination is informed by your discernment. Sometimes you have to remember that the discernment has to be informed by the determination, too. The two have to go together. Remember the image from Ajaan Mun’s last major Dhamma talk: You’re a soldier going to battle. Your primary weapon is your discernment. And what is the soldier? Your determination not to come …
- Right Speech, Inside & Out… This is where the precepts teach discernment. In the Mahayana, they say the precepts teach discernment in figuring out when to hold to them and when not to hold to them. Well, that’s not teaching discernment. That’s just the ordinary way of people around the world. The Buddha’s precepts teach you discernment in how to hold to the truth always, but …
- Concentration Work… In doing this work, you exercise your faculties of mindfulness, alertness, and discernment. There’s a tendency in some circles to encourage students talented in concentration to direct their energies in the direction of concentration. If they’re more talented in the area of analyzing the mind, they’re encouraged in the direction of discernment. Ajaan Fuang, though, would turn tables on people. If …
- Truth Through Training… When he talks about discernment, he describes three levels: The first two— the discernment that comes from listening and the discernment that comes from thinking—deal with the words. But the discernment that comes from developing: That’s a truth that deals with the realities. As he said, we learn about the mind not simply by sitting here watching it, but by training it …
- Admirable Friendship, Inside & Out… They have conviction in the principle of kamma, they’re virtuous, they’re generous, and they’re discerning. You try to become a friend with people like that, and you try to emulate their qualities. You ask them about their conviction, their generosity, their virtue, their discernment, and then you try to follow their example. Most difficult, of course, is the discernment. You find …
- A Tradition of Ingenuity… discerning short breathing, discerning long breathing. What does it mean, to “discern”? Do you simply watch willy-nilly to see what the breath does on its own, or do you try to explore cause and effect? When the Buddha talks about discernment being penetrative, it’s more than just watching things arising and passing away. It’s understanding cause and effect. So does it …
- A Warrior’s Strengths… And you have to be willing to learn in this way, because that’s where your discernment develops. Discernment comes in seeing cause and effect, and if you don’t see it on your own, the discernment never comes. Other people may admire you for your bravery or dismiss you for your cowardliness, but that’s not the issue. The issue is finding which …
- Jhāna & Discernment… There’s a passage where he says, “There’s no discernment without jhāna, no jhāna without discernment.” What he means is that if you want to get the mind into concentration, you have to be able to observe it: See what it’s doing, how it’s putting things together, because that’s the process the Buddha wants you to study and discern. It …
- Mindfulness over Time… They talk about discerning long breathing and discerning short breathing, and if you were totally in the present moment, you wouldn’t know what a long breath was. You would have forgotten when the breath started. You wouldn’t be able to compare a long breath with a short breath. Actually, mindfulness means keeping something in mind. That cuts across the present moment, coming …
- Strong Through Mindfulness… The Buddha wants us to be discerning, which means seeing, when things come, why they come, how they come, and how we can recognize, when something comes, whether it’s to be developed or abandoned. That’s the kind of discernment we want. And that depends on keeping things in mind. When the Buddha talks about making yourself an island in the flood so …
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