Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Lessons from the Buddha’s Awakening… But then he’ll get to a point where he says, “Well, you’ve got to figure this out on your own,” because it’s only in exercising your own ingenuity that you’re going to grow up and develop the discernment you need. It’s not a matter of paint-by-number. The Buddha developed discernment. He developed concentration. You’ve got to …
- Separate… The Buddha says that the essence of discernment is to see things as separate, as other. Things you used to hang onto, things you used to even think of as an extension of yourself, really are separate from you. As long as you feel that you have to depend on them, that’s going to be a scary thought. But when you realize that …
- Analyzing Results… This is how the practice of concentration can lead to sharpening your discernment. The discernment and the concentration help each other along.
- Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice… It’s through observing these processes that we gain discernment. I was reading a while back an interview in which a teacher was talking with a student. The student said that she had been meditating on her breath and found there was a fair amount of pain in her body. So she adjusted the level of her breath, adjusted the way she breathed, and …
- A Basis in Well-being… You look at the teaching on the four noble truths—which we take as the Buddha’s most basic teaching, most comprehensive teaching—and what is it but the application of wisdom and discernment to the question of how to be happy? In the time of the Buddha, lots of people were practicing meditation, and in many cases it was for the sake of …
- Worth… things like generosity and virtue, persistence, patience, discernment, goodwill, and equanimity. Renunciation, truthfulness, determination. These are all qualities that the heart needs. And they’re things that stick with you, in this life on into the next life. This is where you look for value: your value as a person. Of course, it’s not something anyone else can measure, and it has only …
- Rooted in Desire… I did this, and this resulted.” So learning how to ask the right questions at the right time is an important part of gaining discernment. The Buddha said that it’s a sign of people of discernment: how they approach a question, how they frame the question, how they apply it. His observation applies to the discernment related to understanding not only how to …
- W.W.B.R.… Ajaan Maha Boowa calls this discernment fostering concentration. He wrote a whole book on the topic. As he says in the book, sometimes things don’t go right in line with the way they’re listed in the texts: that first there’s virtue and then there’s concentration and then there’s discernment. He says your defilements don’t stand in a neat …
- Goodness Comes from Heedfulness… This is why we suffer from our own lack of skill, from our own lack of discernment as to what we can do that will lead to happiness. We have other ideas that pull us away someplace else. So we can’t be complacent. The Buddha’s last instructions were to achieve completion through heedfulness—in other words, sensing that there’s danger, but …
- Advice for a New Monk… This doesn’t mean that you don’t deal with the problems that come up in life, simply that you learn how to deal with them in a way that’s motivated by mindfulness, alertness, wisdom, compassion, and discernment, rather than simply using them as chess pieces in the game of trying to get whatever pleasure you can get out of life, whether the …
- A Meditation Karma Checklist… From there, you can discern other variations in the breath. Then be aware of the whole body as you breathe in and breathe out. There’s an effort you have to exert to maintain that sense of whole body awareness. Then you calm the fabrication of the body. In other words, you calm the way the breath has an impact on the body. These …
- As Days & Nights Fly Past, Fly Past… So you have to be convinced that we’re here to work on our precepts, work on our concentration, work on our discernment—that all the energy that goes into those skills is well spent. Another quality you look for yourself is learning: We have the opportunity to learn more about the Dhamma. Especially now with the Internet, you can get all kinds of …
- No Running Away… It’s through discernment that you let go. This doesn’t have to be the sort of discernment you read about in books. It simply means the discernment of how to handle things in the mind: how to test the limits of physical properties in your body, of the thoughts in your mind. See how far they go in leading to true happiness and …
- Respect… But if it’s based on generosity, on virtue, on concentration, on discernment, there’s no need for those boundaries. This is why the Buddha said that when you train your mind, you’re also helping others; when you help others, you’re training your mind. The two processes go together when you’re looking for this kind of happiness. And it’s something …
- Chickens from Hell… At the same time, you get more and more discerning about which chickens are the ones that are actually feeding on you. Those you can stop feeding. At the same time, you also get more discerning about what’s the chicken shit and what are the chicken eggs, so that when you have to think, you’re eating only eggs. As you get really …
- Persistence… He says, “You tune your persistence to your level of energy”—in other words, what you’re capable of right now—“and then you tune all the remaining faculties—conviction, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—to that first string. Then pick up the theme of your meditation.” He’s playing with a lot of words here. Picking up the theme is the same as picking …
- Strategic Friends… When you couple that with discernment, which is the ability to see cause and effect, and figure out which effects are things you want, which ones are not, which causes are skillful and which ones are not, you find you can really take your life in hand. So you start doing the things that lead to the results you want more and more. This …
- The Treasure of Equanimity… And finally discernment: the ability to see what’s skillful and what’s not, to see what is your business and what’s not your business. This is where equanimity and discernment come very close together. As the Buddha said, “A fool tries to take on duties that are not his. A wise person takes on only the duties that are his.” So you …
- May I Look After Myself with Ease… This is where the discernment comes in, as you gain a sense of what really is important in life. To what extent can you straighten out the world? You can straighten it out a little bit, but there’s never any closure, never any completion out there. The work of the world never gets done. When people retire, it’s not because their work …
- Pain & the Middle Way… As the Buddha said, without the pleasure of concentration, there’s no way that discernment would be able to do away with your attachment to pain, because as long as you don’t have this alternative pleasure, then no matter how much you understand the drawbacks of sensual pleasure, you’re going to keep going for sensual pleasure. As you go for sensual pleasure …
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