Search results for: "Wisdom"

  1. Page 15
  2. Free from Buddha Nature
     … The teachings are here to bring wisdom to that desire. In dependent co-arising, the Buddha starts out with ignorance: ignorance of the four noble truths and the tasks appropriate for the four noble truths. When you’re ignorant of those tasks, you start doing unskillful things. With ignorance as a condition, there are fabrications. In fact, what you think you are is something … 
  3. Mindful of Death
     … We want to learn how to get some control over that, get some wisdom with regard to that: What things do you want to take as your nourishment? As we’re focusing here in the present moment, it’s to see processes that are bigger than the present moment as well. They can be found here, they can be seen here, but they’re … 
  4. Facing Your Responsibilities
     … As someone once said, there is wisdom in this technique of no escape. Now that you’re sitting here, you’ve got to face your mind: How are you going to train it, how are you going to make this not a miserable experience but actually a blissful, happy, meaningful experience? Those are the skills that most people in the world never develop. But … 
  5. Looking at Your Life
     … That’s how wisdom is developed. Then there’s virtue. You want to make sure you don’t harm anyone. A sense of shame: The idea of doing something harmful comes up in the mind, and you’d feel ashamed to do it. Notice, this is not being ashamed about yourself. You’re ashamed of the action, and being ashamed of the action is … 
  6. Fighting Attitude
     … So wisdom doesn’t lie in simply accepting things as they come. It lies in seeing what you have to accept and what you don’t have to accept. And you don’t know the difference unless you try to work your way around unskillful states. Wisdom lies in realizing how much power you have in the present moment. Some of the things you … 
  7. Training Your Minds
     … That’s one of the basic principles of wisdom. The Buddha said it’s what distinguishes a wise person from a fool. The fool doesn’t see any need to train the mind, so the fool looks for happiness outside. The wise person realizes: You’ve got to train the mind so that it doesn’t sabotage its own happiness. So we start with … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. Persuasion
     … That’s the beginning of wisdom.
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...