Search results for: "Wisdom"

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  2. Doing Your Duty
     … The fear is unnecessary, aside from the type of fear that underlies the wisdom of heedfulness. Any fear beyond that is totally useless. The fact is that all times are times of danger, and this is a time of specific dangers. We take on the duties that are specific to the dangers we face. When these particular dangers have passed, there will be others … 
  3. Kindness in the Light of Karma
    In most people’s eyes, the idea of being kind to yourself means indulging yourself, like the wisdom, quote unquote, on wrappers of Dove chocolate: “Go ahead, be kind to yourself. Have another chocolate.” From there, the idea of being kind to others becomes basically indulging them, doing things they like. But if you think in terms of karma, kindness is something else. Being … 
  4. Unlimited Compassion, Limited Resources
     … The concentration gives you the strength, the wisdom gives you the insight into your own motivations about why you might want to help somebody else, whether you can really trust those motivations or not. The combination of concentration and discernment allows you to step back, view the situation with more objectivity, to view yourself with more objectivity, so that you can figure out: What … 
  5. Stay Principled
     … This is another principle of wisdom or discernment: Always make sure that you go for the long-term happiness, not for the short-term. This means you have to avoid this kind of bias, the bias of wanting to please. The second form of bias is the bias that comes from aversion for people you don’t like, people you want to get back … 
  6. Acceptance Without Suffering
     … This is an important aspect of wisdom and discernment: that you can be with things that would ordinarily make you suffer but you don’t have to suffer. After all, arahants live in this world. They have bodies that have pains, they live in a world where people can say unpleasant things about them or to them, but they’ve learned how not to … 
  7. Dedicating Goodness, Spreading Goodwill
     … You can see this in the question that the Buddha says lies at the beginning of wisdom and discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What’s skillful? What’s blameless?” The wisdom there lies in seeing, one, that long-term happiness is possible, and two, that long-term is better than short-term, and three … 
  8. Discipline Is a Choice
     … This, of course, is a part of wisdom: “What when I do it will be to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Once you’ve got a good answer to that question, you want to stick with it consistently. If you look at discipline not so much as something imposed on you, but as a choice you make to stick with the desires that … 
  9. Freedom & Security
     … One of the keys to the Buddhist teachings on discernment and wisdom is that you’re not trying to look for realities beyond what’s immediately apparent. You want to look very carefully at what’s immediately apparent. It’s right here in front of your eyes. It’s the wisdom of the little kid in the story about the emperor with no clothing … 
  10. Pleasure & Pain
     … You can’t take someone else’s insights and just slap them onto your experience and claim to have wisdom. Discernment comes in three forms: the discernment you learn from other people — the things you hear, the things you read — that’s one level; the things you think through — that’s another level; and then finally the things you learn by trying to develop … 
  11. Switch the Context
     … But here it’s impossible to tell, so instead, the Buddha counsels wisdom: Get out. Get out of the back-and-forth, and here’s your opening. You can pull out of all those narratives in your head and just be here with your body. And just as it’s good to depersonalize the narratives, try to depersonalize your body. It’s just breath … 
  12. Persuasion
     … That’s the beginning of wisdom.
  13. The Easy Way Out
     … We tend to think of wisdom as concepts but it’s actually a matter of sensitivity, noticing when something has happened, noticing when something has been different, seeing minor distinctions. What’s the difference between a desire that’s part of the path and a desire that’s a cause of suffering? You can probably describe it in words if you’ve been reading … 
  14. The World Is Aflame
     … But the practice is basically a search for your own happiness, simply that if you do it with heedfulness, you find that you have to develop wisdom, compassion, and purity as you go along. A person in the audience who said she’d been meditating for thirty-some years, listening to Dhamma talks for thirty-some years, commented that she had never heard the … 
  15. May You Forever Be Well
     … You want to have wisdom doing the looking and listening instead. So if there’s something the mind is eager to have a desire for something. And this is what often happens: It’s not the case that we’re sitting around perfectly neutral and then something comes and makes us feel desire or makes us feel anger. All too often, we’re out … 
  16. Mental Balance
     … the wisdom you’ve gained, the insights you’ve gained. You’ve got a lot more to share So this is the Buddha’s vision of the path. It’s one in which there’s no sharp line between your benefit and the benefit of the people around you. But the focus is working on your qualities of mind, because that’s the prime … 
  17. Freedom Through Painful Practice
    Freedom Through Painful Practice August 6, 2012 One of the measures of your wisdom is the extent to which you have a sense of yourself. When the Buddha was talking about this theme, he wasn’t talking about some sort of mystical knowledge of the Self. It was more having a sense of where your strengths and weaknesses are, and how you can build … 
  18. In Accordance with the Dhamma
     … In other words, you want to develop the wisdom of dispassion. That’s when you really know what the Dhamma is about.
  19. Worry vs. Heedfulness
     … A little bit closer are the skills you can develop as you meditate—and in particular, wisdom in terms of where you look for your happiness and for your security. When you realize that the most important things in life are not so much your work, your family, your relationships, but rather the qualities you build into your mind, that realization puts you on … 
  20. Heedful of Ruts in the Mind
     … Think of the qualities of the Buddha—his wisdom, his compassion, his purity—and try to develop those qualities in yourself. That’s what it means* *to really take refuge. The same with the Dhamma: The Dhamma is timeless—well, you try to make your practice timeless. The Sangha that practices well, practices straightforwardly—well, you try to make your practice straightforward. Anything unskillful … 
  21. Faith in Awakening
     … So again, we’re borrowing the Buddha’s wisdom. As for discernment, that’s when we develop our own. We see into exactly how the mind creates unnecessary suffering, how it can stop, and how it can master all the skills needed to stop. Discernment, in the Buddha’s teaching, is not just knowing things; it’s mastering skills. When we have these skills … 
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