Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. Choices that Matter
     … You’ve got to deal with them somehow, so you take what powers of concentration you have, what powers of discernment you have, and you put them to use. It’s in this way that they get developed. It’s like when you’re hungry. You look in the refrigerator, and the food is a little bit spoiled but not so badly spoiled that … 
  3. A Genius about Your own Mind
     … conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. These are all things we have to develop and in many cases they require a lot of work. Having conviction in the Buddha’s awakening is pretty demanding because it sets forth the possibility that human beings can find a deathless happiness. There are a lot of people, even people nowadays teaching the Dhamma, who shy away from … 
  4. Choices in the Present
     … You need to develop mindfulness, concentration, discernment—all the factors of the path—because they’re your allies in trying to comprehend suffering and letting go of its cause. After all, to comprehend it, you have to sit with it, you have to watch to see when it comes, when it goes, what comes along with it, what goes when it goes away, so … 
  5. How to Leave Meditation
     … It’s only in taking an interest in cause and effect, which is a lot of what discernment is, that the meditation can become a skill and a good foundation for deeper discernment. Finally, remind yourself that even though the visual field may be really interesting, you’ve got to maintain a sense of the breath-field as well. That’s what allows your … 
  6. Relate Everything to the Breath
     … As they say, there’s the discernment that comes from listening and the discernment that comes from thinking. But real knowledge comes with the discernment that comes from actually developing qualities of the mind. Because there’s also ignorance that comes from listening and ignorance that comes from thinking. You read the words in the texts, and they mean one thing to you when … 
  7. Freedom & Security
     … having listened to a lot of Dhamma, generosity, discernment. These are the three positive treasures. “Listening” here means not only listening but also, when you hear something really good, trying to memorize it. Then you think about it, analyze it, try to come to an understanding of what it means and how it applies to your life. This is a treasure in that you … 
  8. Nostalgia for Suffering
     … They’re in the principles.” Which shows that it’s part of our own training in discernment to learn how to take the principles and apply them to our particulars—the particulars of our suffering, of our problems as we meditate. If you have everything handed to you, as many of the forest ajaans will say, then you won’t learn how to fix … 
  9. Realities Right Here
     … Because as you use it to get the mind to settle down, you’re also getting familiar with the categories that the Buddha wants you to think of as you’re trying to understand, trying to gain discernment. The more you like thinking in these terms, the more naturally the discernment will come. You find that you’re not just playing a game. You … 
  10. Outside the Box
     … Which means that right effort has to include a lot of discernment. The Buddha never taught mere brute effort, brute willpower. He taught that effort has to be guided. This is why when Ajaan Lee talks about the different mental qualities that go into mindfulness practice—mindfulness, alertness, and ardency—he assigns wisdom and discernment to ardency, as in knowing how to stir yourself … 
  11. Infinite Good Humor
     … You can develop that quality of very basic wisdom that the Buddha identified as wisdom or discernment in effort, or as we would say, in action. We tend to think of wisdom or discernment as dealing with the three characteristics or emptiness or dependent co-arising: very high-level teachings. But as the Buddha pointed out, it begins with this ability to talk yourself … 
  12. Self-starting
     … the desire to give a discerning answer. In other words, discernment doesn’t just happen without your desiring it. So certain desires play a role on the path that you have to recognize. There are certain things you can’t let go of right away. There are things you have to develop and hold on to. In the case of the banana, Ajaan Chah … 
  13. Persuasion
     … It’s the other two that require some discernment. In fact, the Buddha said this is the measure of your discernment—your ability to use your powers of persuasion to make yourself want to do the things that you ordinarily don’t like to do but will give good long-term results, and to not want to do the things that you like but … 
  14. The Easy Way Out
     … And this is an important element in learning how to develop your own discernment. You can take other people’s beautiful concepts—emptiness sounds wonderful, Oneness sounds wonderful, interconnectedness all sounds wonderful—but they’re just words, ideas, perceptions. You’ve got to learn how to question perceptions as part of the practice—and you need to develop your own sensitivity if you’re … 
  15. Ironclad Technique vs. No Technique
     … In neither way can you really develop discernment. As the Buddha said, the Dhamma is to be nourished within you by committing yourself and then reflecting. When he teaches that principle to Rahula, he teaches him to look at his actions: to look first at his intentions, then at his actions as he’s doing them, and then when they’re done—to see … 
  16. A Post by the Ocean
     … If you can develop more mindfulness, more alertness, more concentration, more discernment in the mind, you’ll be better prepared for handling things as they come up, even if you don’t know ahead of time what they will be. If you’ve got these qualities developed in the mind, you’ll be in a better position to handle anything, whatever comes your way … 
  17. Question & Probe
     … It’s only through those questions supported by concentration that you’re going to develop the discernment that takes you to release. Discernment isn’t something you just copy from what you’ve heard in the books. It comes from probing and questioning. And the concentration is what gives you the foundation that allows you to probe without fear.
  18. Squeezing Goodness Out of the Aggregates
     … where your strengths are, where your weaknesses are in terms of learning, virtue, generosity, conviction, discernment, and particularly your ingenuity. So you try to develop these things. Try to get a sense of what you’ve got here in terms of these aggregates, and what you can do with them. Like the aggregate of form: What can you do with the different elements or … 
  19. Working Ourselves Free
     … This means you need discernment to recognize them for what they are and also to see which parts of the mind are your fifth column, the ones that are all too ready to play along with distractions. In other words, for concentration to give rise to insight, it has to be as consistent and continuous as possible. That’s the work. That’s the … 
  20. A Game of Chess
     … In the course of doing so, you develop your discernment—so in that sense, the back and forth is necessary. Discernment isn’t just a matter of cloning what you read in the books. It’s more tactical. For example, with the khandhas—the five clinging-aggregates: We read in the Buddha’s second sermon, on the not-self characteristic, that as you contemplate … 
  21. Test Everything
     … This is why conviction is one of the strengths on the path, because the only way you’re going to test the Buddha’s teachings on mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment is if you put a lot of effort into them, a lot of time, make a lot of sacrifices. That’s why mundane right view includes, as one of its propositions, that there … 
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