Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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.
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. Immediate Knowledge
     … Right there you’re getting your beginning lesson in discernment, learning to discern differences in the breath, and seeing which differences in terms of pleasure and pain are related to your intentions, the way you perceive the breath, or the way you decide that you’re going to breathe. So the beginning point for certainty lies right here as you focus on the breath … 
  18. Family Ties
     … As he said, some parents have no virtue, no generosity, no conviction, and no discernment. And your way to repay them is not just to hang around and do everything they tell you. You try to find some way of inducing them to be generous if you can, more virtuous if you can. The “if you can” here is important. Sometimes you realize you … 
  19. Character
     … generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, and equanimity. These are all qualities that we can develop in daily life in our duties at work, our duties at home, and whatever other duties we have as we live in the human society. See all these duties as an opportunity to develop something good inside yourself. As one of our chants says, the … 
  20. Dhamma Medicine
     … That’s discernment, when you realize that you’ve got greed, aversion, and delusion, you’ve got other unskillful qualities in the mind, that tend to take over. They make it so that you can’t see things clearly, you can’t hear things clearly. Your vision and your sense of hearing, smell, taste, your sense of your body all get colored by unskillful … 
  21. Part I : Basic Instructions
     … Qualities like mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment: These are all good things to have when the unexpected happens. So rather than plan specific strategies for how you’re going to deal with this, deal with that, remind yourself that often you have to think up and adjust your strategies in line with the situation, and that’s best done if you’re really alert and … 
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