Search results for: "Wisdom"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. Stupid about Pleasure
     … Only the wisdom of either/or can get you beyond.
  14. 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 … 
  15. Universal Truths
     … In terms of skillful and unskillful action, he said, this is what you should ask wise people: “What is skillful? What is unskillful? 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?” That, he said, is the beginning of wisdom. And as for questions around … 
  16. Breath Meditation When It’s Hard to Breathe
     … We have the wisdom of those who have gone on before, people who’ve had experience in this way and left behind some ideas. We have to figure out how to understand their teachings and how to apply those teachings to our condition right now. We take their teachings as tools to explore what’s going on in the body, what’s going on … 
  17. The Desire to Be Free from Desire
     … You want your discernment, your wisdom, to be in charge of what you want, because what you want is going to shape everything you experience. If you direct your wants in the right direction, they can take you to a place where the wants are satisfied. When the Buddha talks about nibbana, he describes it as the highest happiness. Peace. Freedom. A consciousness without … 
  18. The Perception of Inconstancy
     … You don’t want to just label, “Everything changes, everything is inconstant,” and think that you’ve attained wisdom of some kind. I know a monk who had been in the Forest tradition for several years. He went back home to his family, and his brother asked him, “Well, what did you learn, being a monk over there? What’s this teaching of the … 
  19. Goodwill Is Respect
     … He respected his own desire for happiness and, through that, he was able to develop qualities of wisdom, purity, compassion. And he respected other people’s desire for happiness, too. When we extend thoughts of goodwill to others, we’re not saying, as some people say, that we’re basically accepting them. Actually, we’re respecting their desire for happiness. Now, this doesn’t … 
  20. Effortlessness Through Effort
     … The Buddha talks about that as being a sign of wisdom: You learn how to get yourself to want to do the things you start out not wanting to do but are going to give good results. You learn how to talk yourself into seeing that it’s a good thing. And then you learn to make a sport, say, out of shooting down … 
  21. How the Breath Helps You to Die Well
     … Most people don’t have the wisdom to say, “Well, how can I learn to live without them beforehand?” They just hang on more and more tightly. So what you’re getting here is experience in the fact that your awareness can be perfectly fine with a minimum of fabrication. If you really get down to the root of the fabrication, you can get … 
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