Search results for: "Discernment"
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- The Five Precepts for the Mind… It trains you in concentration and discernment. You have to be mindful to keep the precept in mind. You have to be alert, watching your behavior to make sure that it’s not straying from the precept. And it requires a lot of discernment. There are times when you’re tempted to get past a difficult situation with a little white lie. But it …
- Do Jhana… The action leads to that kind of result.” The questions you ask as you’re looking at your actions are the questions of discernment. They replace our other, more normal questions, which are the questions of papañca: “Who am I? Where am I? What’s the world around me?” Those are actually the questions of hunger because your identity of who you are is …
- Change Your Habits… Strength comes from your conviction, your persistence, your mindfulness, your concentration, your discernment. Figuring things out is the ultimate strength. Of the five strengths the Buddha talked about, discernment is the big one. Ajaan Lee has a nice quote. He says for a person with discernment, all you need is a machete and you can set yourself up in life. Even if you have …
- Learning from Labor… If concentration is all you’re doing, you’re going to need some discernment, the discernment that opens things up. That can come only from within, as a result of seeing what you’re doing and getting more and more perceptive about what you’re doing and the results you’re getting. That’s how concentration acts as a basis for mindfulness, as a …
- Strong & Heedful… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. Conviction is conviction in the principle of karma. In other words, believing that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the intentions you act on. That conviction helps get rid of the delusion that somehow you can act in sloppy ways, or act in careless ways, or even act in evil ways, and not …
- Ready for the Truth… the practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment—or what the Buddha called heightened virtue, heightened mind, heightened discernment. Discernment, concentration, virtue: all for the purpose of freedom. That’s the alternative, and it does set you free. The ways of the world tie you down. The more you acquire, the more responsibilities you take on, and the less time you have to devote totally …
- The Safety of Dualities… It’s what discernment is all about. You start developing discernment by noticing what in the mind is skillful, what in the mind is not skillful, and then pursuing greater and greater refinement in understanding what’s skillful and what’s not. You learn by comparing the two sides of a duality. In that way, you protect yourself. You have a basis for making …
- Concentration & Renunciation… You also need some discernment: the discernment to see what kind of perceptions you’re applying to the pain, in your relationship to the pain, that are aggravating it, that are actually forming a bridge from the physical pain into the mind, where they turn it into a mental pain and make it more than it has to be. So the meditation is here …
- Nobody’s Servant… It develops your discernment. You learn how to read your breath, what it can do for the body. And when a sense of well-being comes up, it requires discernment, one, not to go jumping onto the sense of pleasure and leaving the breath; and two, to keep it going. And then three, once you’re keeping it going, what can you do to …
- Not Resolved on Self… As you practice virtue, as you practice concentration, as you practice discernment, you want to develop each of these practices into a skill. Issues of self can get pushed off to the side. This is why when the Buddha described his own awakening, he didn’t describe it as awakening to the three characteristics. It was awakening to the four noble truths. The four …
- Stress… For example, the three perceptions are teachings on discernment, so they fall in the context of the questions that lie at the basis of discernment: “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? What’s skillful? What’s unskillful? What’s blameless? What’s …
- Motivation… One of the first exercises of your discernment when you meditate is how to get yourself to meditate when you don’t feel like it—or how to get yourself to meditate when a lot of other things are pulling you in their direction. As the Buddha said, this is one of the measures of your discernment and wisdom. One of the reasons we …
- Levels of Truth… That right there requires some discernment, but it’s an exercise in discernment, which is how your discernment grows.
- Ingenuity… The fourth quality that makes you a good friend to yourself is to be discerning, seeing which actions lead to suffering, which actions lead away. The Buddha calls this “penetrative discernment of arising and passing away.” It doesn’t mean you just simply watch things coming and going. For the discernment to be penetrative, you have to see that when some things come, they …
- Exercising the Mind… As you develop skill in maintaining that sense of steady but relaxed focus, that’s the beginning of discernment. You begin to see what works and what doesn’t work: how you can develop that sense of focus, how you can maintain it, how you can destroy it inadvertently. Over time, you develop discernment and knowledge through doing the work of the concentration. This …
- The Ennobling Path… It requires both the qualities of serenity and concentration on the one hand, and the qualities of insight and discernment on the other. They go hand-in-hand. This is a different kind of discernment from ehs we use in normal everyday activities. It’s one that penetrates the concentration, one that goes along with the concentration, and is devoted to making the concentration …
- Making a Refuge… Then there are the qualities of mindfulness and discernment. Mindfulness, of course, builds on right effort and informs right effort because you remember what’s skillful and what’s not. In terms of your practice, you remember what’s worked and what hasn’t worked. That’s a protection right there. Then finally, discernment is what enables you to make the distinctions you need …
- Remembering Ajaan Lee… That’s a lot of the discernment right there. It’s an area of discernment where the books can give us some guidance, but we have to learn how to use our own powers of observation and our own ingenuity to make the most of what we’ve got. So when you look at Ajaan Lee’s teachings, these are some of the lessons …
- True Friends… That’s what the fourth quality is all about, discernment. The Buddha said that discernment begins with the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to long-term welfare and happiness?” He wants you to think about the long-term consequences of your actions, and not just go for what’s pleasant right away. And the answer to that question—“What will lead …
- Mindfulness… This is why mindfulness and discernment usually go together. In fact, in Thai they have a term, sati-pañña, mindfulness-discernment, which is their word for intelligence. It’s the intelligence of a really practical person, one who knows the distinction between what’s skillful and what’s not, and is wise enough to know that you have to keep that in mind so …
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