Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Even Common Animals Can Be Trained… Concentration, discernment: All of these things involve restraint. With generosity, you hold yourself back from using up things that you could give to other people. With the precepts, of course, you hold yourself back from doing and saying things that you know are going to be harmful. With concentration, you restrain your mind from wandering around as it ordinarily might. You keep your mind …
- Top Priorities… The first is discernment, learning to see what’s important, learning to see clearly what has to be done to get to what’s important: understanding the path, what has to be developed, what has to be abandoned, and learning to make distinctions. A while back I was leading a course on the perfections, and someone noticed that when you look at the list …
- When Your Will Is Ill… They’re obstacles to your concentration, they obscure your discernment, they obscure your awareness. So you’ve got to get past them. The first step in each case in trying to get past is to see that they’re worth getting past. I remember that when I first learned about the hindrances and how ill will doesn’t mean negativity or dislike—it means …
- Delight… Other people say, “Well, it’s a necessary step, but let’s get through it as fast as we can so we can get onto the really interesting work of discernment.” But the discernment work is not going to work—it’s not going to have the proper effect—unless you really pay careful attention to what’s happening as the mind settles down …
- A Haven for Inner Wealth… Finally, there’s discernment, when you see what is actually skillful and what is not, and you pursue that into more and more subtle levels. These are the qualities we want to protect because they protect our good actions. That’s why they’re our treasures. When we’re meditating, we want to keep this in mind, that these are qualities we need to …
- Endurance & Restraint… When you’re discerning, it’s as if you’re in a tower. You’ve raised yourself above the issues around you, and the mind is no longer a slave to them, no longer takes them as its food. You feed off of something better: You feed off of wisdom, you feed off of discernment. It’s in this way that you can aim …
- Refuge in an Admirable Friend… The first quality is wisdom, discernment. As he says, the question that lies at the beginning of discernment is going to someone who is knowledgeable and asking, “What is skillful?” “What is unskillful?” “What, when I do, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” “What, when I do, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering?” The wisdom there is in …
- A Post for the Mind… He says discernment is what stays still as other things in the mind move. And you want to see these movements. When you go out for something, why are you going? What impels the mind? If it’s lust pulling you out, the Buddha first has you contemplate the object, but not in the way you’d ordinarily contemplate it. He has you contemplate …
- More Buddhist Engineering… You can construct virtue, concentration, and discernment, like a bridge that takes you across a river, or a road that takes you to a mountain. You don’t build the other side of the river, you don’t build the mountain, but you can build the way to get there. We talked the other day about Buddhist engineering. And it’s good to think …
- Fear & Uncertainty… And as it so happens, that’s the same way you provide food for analysis of qualities as a factor for awakening, which is the discernment factor. So you’re developing your discernment as a way of overcoming your uncertainty, realizing that the real dangers are inside, but that your protection lies inside as well. If you develop more and more skillful qualities, then …
- The Buddha’s Last Word… A lot of the teaching is meant for you to exercise your own discernment and try to figure it out. And as a result, of course, different people will exercise their discernment in different ways to come up with different conclusions. But in many cases, if the student is well intentioned and has some integrity, whatever the solution he or she comes up with …
- Inner Worlds… This is where the practice of concentration contains an element of discernment already in its sense of values to create the space and then to maintain a sense of well-being as you go back into the other worlds. This requires determination, and it also requires discernment because as you go into the other worlds, it’s all too easy to pick up their …
- A Separate Self… And if we can’t see that, what are we going to see? Where are we going to gain any discernment? Because that’s what discernment is. We suffer because of our ignorance. Our ignorance has nothing to do with how we define ourself. It has to do with our understanding of how craving and ignorance and particularly the craving and ignorance in our …
- Meditation as a Skill… It’s a skillful desire, because it contains some discernment. You focus your desire on sticking with the causes. You’re mindful, alert, or as the passage says in terms of right concentration, you have directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath and you evaluate how things are going. Then the results are going to come: a sense of ease …
- Getting Your Head Around the Goal … Then there’s the discernment that comes from thinking things through, and then the discernment that comes from developing. A lot of times, our problem is we want to think things through beforehand in the hope that the more we analyze the issue, the more we read and think about things, then the more we’ll have a good idea of what it’s …
- Effective Self-Discipline… The discernment, the understanding that lead to awakening are things that you develop through your discernment and understanding of little things that are happening right here, right now. This principle applies not only to your meditation but also to your daily life. This is why right action, right speech, and right livelihood are part of the path. Be careful about what you do, be …
- Songkran Blessing… And then the discernment to see which ways you’re causing unnecessary suffering and how you can stop. These five strengths are the things that will carry you through. They’ll make sure that whatever other blessings you gain in life do stay as blessings and don’t become curses. So think about taking the blessing of wanting mindfulness and discernment so you can …
- Learning by Doing… This is a principle that applies to all the different ways of analyzing your experience that the Buddha talks about with reference to developing discernment. With the aggregates, it’s the same sort of thing: How do you get to know the aggregates? Through making a state of concentration out of them. How do you get to know the elements—the four physical elements …
- The Power of Intention… All the Buddha’s teachings on causality, all the discernment teachings, have to do with intentions. He taught causality not in general. He wasn’t concerned about the causality that operates, say, making the orbit of the moon so erratic, or it determining the motions of Jupiter’s moons. He was concerned with causality as it relates to your intentions, starting with ignorance of …
- Brahmaviharas on the Path… There’s wisdom here, too, in the sense of the set of questions that the Buddha says lie at the beginning of discernment: “What is skillful? What is blameless? What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The discernment here lies in recognizing that our actions are the big factors that lead to happiness, and that long-term …
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