Search results for: "Wisdom"

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  2. How to Read Yourself
     … But he had the wisdom to see that there must be something else, another path. He was willing to give up the pride that went with his austerities. Then, as he got the mind into concentration, he began to gain knowledge. And again, he didn’t get waylaid by his knowledge. There were people in his time who, when they began to remember previous … 
  3. The Skills of Stillness
     … This is where wisdom comes into the meditation. You could be mindful of anything, you could keep anything in mind. You could be alert to anything in the present moment. But if you try to do this well, you try to keep in mind the things that are relevant to getting the mind to settle down and you’re alert to what you’re … 
  4. Circumspection
     … There are the ones that are energizing, like analysis of qualities—that’s the wisdom or discernment faculty—persistence, and rapture. These things energize you. Then there are the calming factors: serenity, concentration, equanimity. You’ve got to figure out which ones you need right now. So how do you figure that out? You watch. You try things out and see what works and … 
  5. Focused on Results
     … After all, the Buddha said that wisdom begins with the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” That’s looking for a result right there. Long-term results, lasting results: That’s what we want. The question is, “How do we get those lasting results?” Two wrong ways of being focused on results that get in … 
  6. Virtues & Values
     … So if a thought is unskillful, you try to develop the wisdom to recognize it as unskillful and to make up your mind to abandon it. If a skillful quality arises in the mind, again, you don’t simply watch it come and go, and think that that’s insight. You try to develop it; you try to maintain it. You protect it. And … 
  7. Four Virtues
     … You want wisdom, you want mindfulness and discernment to do your looking. In this way, you’re developing qualities you’re going to need for formal meditation. Looking, listening, and smelling, thinking, tasting, and touching: These are things we do all the way throughout the day. So there is always opportunity for practicing, for developing the mind. Another one of the four virtues is … 
  8. How & Why We Meditate
     … We’re probably not making them all that wisely, but we do have some wisdom. We do have some discernment. It’s just a matter of applying it, giving it a foundation here in the present moment, and then really using it to look carefully to see: Where are we creating unnecessary stress and suffering for ourselves? What can we do to change? It … 
  9. Resolute Good Humor
     … Then the next morning, as the gates are open, they come filing into the city, and people say, “Oh, here come the nuns back from spending the night with the monks.” So, even though the monk had psychic powers, he didn’t have the wisdom he needed to know how to use those powers well. So there’s a lot of humor in the … 
  10. The Demands of Goodwill
     … That’s the duty of wisdom or discernment. So goodwill can play a large role in the practice, but it’s not everything. One of the people in the course commented, “Well, I guess you could say that goodwill is a complete practice but it needs some other things as well.” Everybody in the room laughed. It’s like saying that rice is a … 
  11. Commit & Reflect
     … Of course, the two processes go together because as you develop more and more skillful qualities, you’ll be able to see things more clearly, reflect with more wisdom, more discernment. If we apply this way of looking at the Dhamma—to, say, the five faculties—we see how this is so. You start out with conviction. You take as working hypothesis the principle … 
  12. Faith in the Buddha
    As the Buddha tells it, wisdom begins with conviction. Not a generalized conviction, very specific: conviction in his awakening—that what he awakened to was true, that the way he went about it could enable him to see truths like that, and that these truths are relevant for our lives. There’s nothing unreasonable about these propositions. Faith or conviction in the Buddha’s … 
  13. Focus on the Precepts
     … It starts with that question: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering?” The question that frames discernment or frames wisdom is a question about karma, motivated by the desire to find true happiness through your actions. So the question itself is a type … 
  14. The Escape of Discipline
     … So this is the beginning of wisdom: when you see that the mind has to be trained. And the Buddha keeps encouraging us that it can be done, and that the training doesn’t have to force you to eat nothing but bread and water and sleep on a plank, wear a hairshirt. In fact, the first factor of the path that the Buddha … 
  15. Desire for Happiness
     … This is the beginning of what are sometimes called the wisdom and compassion—more appropriately the discernment and goodwill—that underlie the practice. That’s what starts us out. It’s why we chant these things every day. Now, for most of us, our desire for happiness in a world where there is a lot of suffering often leads us to harden ourselves. We … 
  16. Delight in Conviction
     … We’re tapping into his wisdom, borrowing it for the time being until we can confirm it in ourselves. So take joy in that fact. This is called delighting in the Dhamma. We look at the world outside, and if we’re looking for happiness out there, we will find some. The Buddha doesn’t deny that. But it’s not reliable. It comes … 
  17. A Meditator’s Environment
     … How do you do it? Who in your mind is doing the looking? Is greed doing the looking? Or is wisdom doing the looking? Anger? Jealousy? Are these things doing the looking and the listening? Is it the desire for something to get angry about? After all, it’s not the case that something outside will come in and just set off defilements in … 
  18. Finding Balance
     … It provides a foundation for really understanding what’s going on in the mind, for learning how to foster skillful qualities and let go of unskillful ones, which is the beginning of discernment, wisdom. This way you develop the qualities of tranquility and insight together. This is how they function ideally. They function in tandem. So you use the insight to improve your concentration … 
  19. Daily-Life Dhamma
     … So this quality of truthfulness requires some discernment, some wisdom, that once you’ve made up your mind that something is worth doing, you keep at it. And you can keep talking yourself into keeping at it. You don’t give in to the voices that say, “I’ve had enough,” or, “This is too much for me.” So truth is one of the … 
  20. Stupid about Pleasure
     … Only the wisdom of either/or can get you beyond.
  21. The Truth of Desires
     … You’ve got the wisdom of the Buddha’s four noble truths on your side. That’s an important ally, too. Notice that those truths are truths about cause and effect, what’s possible and what’s not possible: truths about things that are very close to your mind, truths about suffering, what the cause is, and what’s the desire behind this suffering … 
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