Search results for: "Wisdom"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Recollecting the Buddha… It informs his wisdom, informs his purity, and informs his compassion—the virtues that are traditionally attributed to him. He was a very true person. It requires someone who’s true like that to find the truth. So contemplating the Buddha in that way—if you have doubts about the Dhamma—helps to overcome those doubts. The problem with thinking about how amazing the …
- Three Types of Equanimity… There was an interview I saw on French TV recently, where the woman being interviewed was saying that the Buddha’s wisdom is all about accepting things as they are, and not trying to make any changes, accepting the fact that any changes you try to make are just going to make things worse. The interviewer asked the woman who was saying this, “Isn …
- Firm in Your Intent… A lot of wisdom lies in realizing that: that you don’t just gain an insight into the nature of reality, but you also have to gain an insight into what you’ve got to do, how you can do it, and you just do it. That’s why he says one of the signs of discernment is when you realize there are certain …
- Write It Down in Your Heart… The first two monks said, “You should practice equanimity.” When it came Ajaan Chah’s turn, he said, “Well, you do have to be equanimous, but you have to be equanimous with wisdom.” In other words, it’s not just a case of letting go. Ajaan MahaBua was famous for being strict, talking about going out and just punching out the defilements. But he …
- Concentration Work… It’s in the listening that your mindfulness, alertness, and discernment develop and, acting together, bring the mind to a really solid concentration that can act as a basis for further wisdom, discernment, and insight to arise. You have to be willing to put in the effort, confident that the effort will pay off. What you give to the meditation is what makes all …
- Near to the Buddha… They talk about wisdom, which is basically looking for long-term happiness, not running for short-term. As you listen to them talk, you start talking to yourself in those ways as well. You remind yourself: There are things you’ve got to give up in life. We go through life, seeing this pleasure and that pleasure, and we’d like to have them …
- Mindstorms… And there’s a wisdom in learning how to stay there and watch, watch, watch, not to be impatient to get results, not to be impatient to see how things turn out. Learn how to be more stable in that watching, because the stability is what will allow you to see very subtle things, to see the tricks the mind plays on itself, the …
- It’s Good to Talk to Yourself… It’s one of the hallmarks of wisdom, knowing which questions are worth pursuing and which ones are not. Just because a question has grabbed your attention doesn’t mean it’s really worthwhile. As you’re working with the breath, you begin to get a sense of which questions are helpful in getting the mind to settle down, which ones are not, which …
- Compassion Without Clinging… that he’s gone, do you know where he’s gone?” “No.” “Where is this person you’re grieving for?” He’s advising her to develop some equanimity, to get some wisdom around the fact that she’s lost this unknown person who was, for a while, her son. I was teaching this story one time to a group in Canada. Someone in the …
- Inner Poise… We think of wisdom or discernment as things you learn from books, but that’s not the case at all. You gain discernment from watching things consistently. When you’re staying with the breath, you’re in really good place, because that’s where the body and the mind meet. Anything that moves in the mind is going to have an effect on the …
- Dualities… That’s a lot of what the Buddha’s wisdom and discernment are about: learning how to use things that eventually you’re going to have to let go—and not being in too great a hurry to let them go, either. For example, with these states of concentration we’re working on: You want to get very familiar with them before you’ll …
- High Level Metta… This is the wisdom element in all this fabrication. Now, if you bring knowledge to this, it actually becomes part of the path. You’re developing right concentration. And as you get hands-on practice with these different kinds of fabrication, you begin to realize how you use them in different ways, creating different mind states throughout the day, different physical states throughout the …
- Taking Apart Suffering… Learn to identify both in the body and in the mind the parts that are potential for a sense of ease, a potential for equanimity, wisdom, this patient observer, and then take apart the unskillful things. In other words, you master this ability that you have to put things together which we’re so good at—in the sense that we do it all …
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