Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. The Intelligent Heart
     … Of course, you want to be intelligent about your wants, which is why the Buddha said that discernment starts with the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Happiness is something we ordinarily want, but the problem is that we tend to be kind of stupid about it. We want what we want with the minimum … 
  3. Respect for the Precepts
     … When you can look at your actions and realize that you haven’t harmed anybody, that you’ve held to your principles, it gives you the self-esteem and confidence needed to get the mind into the type of concentration that will lead to discernment. Then concentration and discernment will help make your practice of the precepts even more solid and perceptive. One of … 
  4. Bases for Success
     … To be right, you also have to have some discernment into what is skillful and what’s not. So the difference among the four bases seems to be more a question of emphasis as to which factor is going to be strongest in your concentration, because all four have to be present. You see them all in the factors for the first stage of … 
  5. Goodwill for the Breath
     … As the Buddha once said, wisdom and discernment begin with that question: What can we do that will lead to our long-term welfare and happiness? The whole teaching comes out of that question. We practice generosity, we practice virtue, as means for long-term happiness. We come to meditate, and it’s for the same purpose. So you want to do the meditation … 
  6. Insight into Pain
     … virtue, concentration, discernment, and release. These four noble dhammas give a more complete picture of what we’re about here. We’re here for release. You recognize discernment as being genuine discernment when it brings release. You see something you didn’t see before, you understand something you didn’t understand before, and in the understanding, there’s a release from suffering. That’s … 
  7. Complexities of the Mind
     … He says all the other aspects of the practice are like food and other supplies for a soldier in battle, but discernment is what actually does the work. We’re trying to develop our discernment. It takes time. And the development of discernment and the development of concentration have to go hand-in-hand, just as a soldier can’t fight without food, but … 
  8. Battling the Hindrances
     … That’s what discernment is for. We’re not just trying to clone the Buddha’s discernment. We’re trying to develop our own, to learn how to be more strategic, how to think with more ingenuity in this direction. We’ve used a lot of ingenuity to foster our hindrances, well, now it’s time to turn the ingenuity around and work back … 
  9. Reinvest Your Noble Treasures
     … You’ve got the profits of conviction, of a sense of compunction, shame, virtue, learning, generosity, discernment. You gain these things. You can use them for all kinds of purposes. There are a lot of people who use their discernment just to gain more money—that’s a real waste. Use your discernment to find the deathless. Reinvest your noble treasures. And you’ll … 
  10. Immersed in the Body
    In the verses on respect that we chant often, the Buddha mentions respect for the triple training, which is training and heightened virtue, heightened mind or concentration, and heightened discernment. But he also mentions respect for concentration. It’s as if he wanted to make sure you know, that you’re doubly sure, that concentration is important. Maybe he foresaw that, in later centuries … 
  11. Skillful Thinking
     … That’s a sign of discernment. Discernment isn’t built except by using it, exercising it. No matter how strong or weak it is, you’ve got to take what you’ve got and put it to use if you want it to get stronger. It’s like your body. If you sit and wait for it to get strong on its own without … 
  12. Friends with the Dhamma Wheel
     … We have that phrase in another one of our chants, “those who don’t discern suffering.” People sometimes wonder how you can say that anyone doesn’t discern suffering; everybody knows they suffer. Well, they may know they suffer, but they don’t know why. They don’t really know what the suffering is. They see it and they run away. They see it … 
  13. A Simple Path Through a Complex Map
     … When you’re starting out, he talks about virtue, concentration, and discernment. In doing so, he’s actually getting you to loop things back through name and form, right past attention and intention. So, without giving you the terms or giving you the whole picture, he’s getting you started on the right approach—how to use these functions in the mind. With virtue … 
  14. Nourishment from the Breath
     … When you get clearer and clearer on what’s wrong and what’s right with the concentration, and you start getting ideas of how to fix what’s wrong and to maintain and augment what’s right, that’s the discernment element. In other words, you have to have some discernment in your concentration. Concentration without discernment drifts off and is not really all … 
  15. A Refuge from Death
     … This is why the Buddha said that discernment is part of the path. You discern how intentions shape your experience, and you also discern how you can refine them to the point where there are no more intentions. That’s the point that ends all your doubts about the deathless, all your doubts about the Dhamma. And that’s when your refuge gets really … 
  16. Wearing the Breath
     … It’s in this way that concentration leads to discernment, so that you can do concentration work and discernment work at the same time. And in this way, your discernment is guaranteed not to turn into thought worlds or speculation worlds. It’s a discernment that sees the processes as they’re happening, step by step, right here, right now, without losing this frame … 
  17. Visakha Puja
     … The candles, of course, stand for discernment: the light of discernment that drives away the darkness of ignorance, particularly the ignorance that causes us to act in ways that are harmful to ourselves, creating suffering even though we want happiness. Those are the symbols. These symbols have meaning, though, only when they refer to something real. And the reality is the actual practice we … 
  18. Strength Training
     … You’re strengthening your mind so that it develops strengths of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and even discernment. Discernment is not a matter of coming up with clever insights, or taking concepts you’ve learned from the books and slapping them on your mind. I got a phone call the other night from someone who was talking about how he was trying to apply … 
  19. Inner Wealth
     … Ajaan Lee once said that of the various treasures of the mind, the most valuable one was discernment, because if you have discernment then you can make use of whatever you get. Even if you get only a little, you can turn it into a lot. So as you wonder about what you take with you as you go in this wandering around, focus … 
  20. Focus on the Precepts
     … As they get you to focus specifically on your actions, that’s training in discernment. After all, discernment is focused on: What exactly are you doing? You’re doing the causes of suffering someplace in your mind, and you want to see those actions along with why you do them. You want to develop the actions that lead to the end of suffering. So … 
  21. The Positive Side of Heedfulness
     … You can focus on developing powers of patience and endurance, or you can focus on your discernment—because work does require discernment. We had a question today about whether creativity was in line with the Dhamma as you work. Well, it’s an exercise of your discernment. Again, all too often, we think of discernment as simply observing things as they’re happening. But … 
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