Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. The First Noble Truth
    The First Noble Truth November 5, 2015 The passage we chanted now starts with a very strange phrase: “those who don’t discern suffering.” You would think that everybody would discern suffering. But in this passage the Buddha’s talking about understanding suffering on a deeper level. When he explains the truth of suffering—he uses the word dukkha, which can cover everything from … 
  15. Your Tranquility & Your Insight
     … Again, this is how you develop discernment, your discernment. If you could do it just by rote, it wouldn’t be very discerning at all. It would be like a factory process. But the mind is not a factory. And your attachment to things: Even though there’s a common denominator in all attachment, the particulars of your attachments are going to be yours … 
  16. Equanimity in Action, Equanimity at Rest
     … wanting the ability to accept what you can’t change, the courage to change what you can change, and the discernment or wisdom to know the difference. But life is a lot more complicated than that. There are a lot of things that you could change but wouldn’t be worth it. And that requires real discernment. After all, even though we try to … 
  17. Damming & Diverting
     … This is where the discernment comes in. The discernment has already helped in analyzing it in terms of fabrication. But as you keep diverting and diverting and diverting these unskillful thoughts, you get closer and closer to their source. Their source is the allure: why you go for these things. Sometimes you hear that we go for things because we think they have innate … 
  18. Self-Control
     … That’s the Buddha’s gift to us, showing us the skill of learning how to treasure our virtue, our concentration, our discernment, as our most important possessions—how to protect our intentions to make sure that they’re not simply pushed around by negative things outside. You look around at the world and it’s hardly ideal at all. We’re living in … 
  19. Strategic Wisdom
     … That’s where the discernment comes in, because in getting the mind to settle down, it’s not that the discernment comes only after the mind really is still. The process of getting the mind to settle down does require some wisdom, it requires some discernment, requires you using your intelligence and your ingenuity. That kind of concentration has discernment built into it. You … 
  20. Skills to Make a Difference
     … This is how discernment develops. Remember, the Buddha’s first question for discernment is a dualistic question: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? When, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and pain?” You’re trying to see these distinctions. When the Buddha sets forth his answers to that question, basically they … 
  21. To Strengthen the Path
     … The other strength that’s related to that is discernment. When you see that you’re creating suffering for yourself anywhere, you want to look into it. We talk about seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, and it sounds kind of exotic and formal. But it’s actually something very close to what we do a lot of the time with … 
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