Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Evaluation… How else do you think discernment is going to rise? It’s not a matter of putting your mind into a meat grinder. It’s a matter of being very sensitive to what you’re doing and learning how to evaluate the results, becoming more and more sensitive as you go along. That way, discernment comes not from following instructions, but from developing your …
- The Four Jhanas… This is the kind of concentration that can provide a good foundation for insight, for discernment. Its range of view is all around, with few blind spots. The stronger this concentration, the more refined the discernment you can develop. So don’t worry about when to stop doing concentration and to start doing discernment work. As the Buddha said, it requires a certain amount …
- Pride in Your Craft… And that’s a sign of a person with real discernment. Ajaan Lee’s comment was that a person with discernment is someone who can take whatever they’ve got and get good use out of it. And so you take the level of concentration you’ve got now and try learn from it. Try to become more skillful in how you approach it …
- To Take Danger in Stride… Virtue, concentration, and discernment are basically survival skills. Attitudes of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, learning how to develop those in all situations where they’re needed: Those are survival skills, too. As a famous philosopher once said, we live forward but understand backward. We’re going to live in the world and we’re going to have to make choices about what to …
- A Committed Relationship… This is where discernment comes in. It enables you to stay with your commitment here to the breath. For example, it’s very easy when the mind gets concentrated to say, “Well, that’s enough concentration. Now I can move on to something else.” But you have to remember, you need this skill in all sorts of situations. This is where the recollection of …
- Visakha Puja – True Homage… The candles stand for discernment that throws light on our actions, revealing to us how we cause suffering and how we can learn how not to cause suffering. Those are the symbols, but we don’t want just the symbols. We want the reality. So let’s meditate. Focus on your breath. Know when the breath is coming in, know when it’s going …
- Faith as a Virtue… Remember the questions that lie at the beginning of discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” In asking those questions, you’re taking responsibility. They go together with two other questions: “What is blameworthy? What is blameless?” You want to make sure …
- Endurance & Equanimity… So try to use some discernment in your restraint. Realize that you don’t want your goodness to depend on the goodness of other people, because their goodness is an extremely undependable support. You want to depend on your determination. Remember we’re here to develop the perfections, and the perfections have to be developed by determination. They don’t come naturally. They come …
- Determination… You have to develop your energy, your persistence, your stick-with-it-ivedness, your mindfulness and alertness, to refine your discernment so that when you see the results of your actions, you can be a good judge of them. When things are not going well, is it a sign that the path is not going to work at all, or simply that you’re …
- A Matter of Life & Death… Stick with a difficult situation longer than you might want to, just to see if you can maintain your concentration, and use your insight, use your discernment, to make sure that even though the situation outside is difficult, it doesn’t cause suffering inside. This is ultimately what refuge means: your ability to depend on your own mind, to depend on the qualities you …
- Drowsiness… You’re alert, energized, still—the type of concentration that’s ready for discernment. It’s in that intermediate, neighborhood stage that drowsiness can set in. This is where sloth and torpor as a hindrance can come in as well. And because it’s an inevitable stage of the concentration, you have to prepare so that you don’t drift off. That is why …
- Four Virtues… All of this develops good qualities in the mind, qualities that are important in developing concentration and discernment. There’s a continuity, the same theme all the way through. As one of the forest ajaans once said, Dhamma is one thing clear through, starting with generosity and going up all the way to the noble attainments. So as you’re working on your precepts …
- How & Why We Meditate… The ultimate problems are going to require very refined discernment. You develop that discernment from your right effort as you practice. So, to develop right effort as a beginning step, you use whatever cruder skills you have at your disposal: conviction, patience, your stick-to-it-iveness. Now, that can get very old very quickly if you don’t have something of interest. That …
- Goodwill Is Respect… The same with discernment, seeing where you’re clinging to things, seeing where you’re craving things, often things that you like an awful lot: As you learn to reflect that these clingings and cravings really are suffering and are causing suffering, then you’re willing to give it a try to really let them go, put them aside. As you do that, there …
- Unhindered at Death… But they also hinder discernment. And when you look at the Buddha’s list of things that can go wrong as you’re approaching death, the hindrances loom large as well. So when you are cleaning them out of the way right now, it’s not just a matter of arranging for a nice meditation tonight. You’re trying to get some skill in …
- Effort against the Hindrances… In other words, we want to make concentration arise and to provide the conditions for discernment. As for unskillful thoughts that get in the way of concentration, we want to make sure they don’t arise. If they do arise, we want to speed up their passing away. As a group, those thoughts are called hindrances, and there are five altogether: sensual desire, ill …
- The Path to the Top… Only when you have discernment, which is the ridge pole, is the frame for the roof secure. So the only way you can know the truth of the teaching is to put it to the test until discernment arises—and it has to be a rigorous test. As Ajaan Lee once said, you have to be really true to the teachings if you’re …
- When You’re Discouraged… And gradually, by using what you’ve got — what discernment you have, what concentration you have, what mindfulness you have — you get stronger. This is another incident from my life as a meditator. Before my ordination, I was sitting meditating with Ajaan Fuang’s lay students in Bangkok. They all seemed to be having really great progress in their meditation, very fast progress in …
- The Escape of Discipline… Then there’s the happiness that comes from understanding, from discernment: seeing where you have habits that cause unnecessary stress, unnecessary suffering, understanding why you do them, and understanding how you can drop them. A great sense of relief and release comes with that. So the training that the Buddha offers is not three hundred spears a day. The path itself—even though it …
- Everything’s Right There… That may make flour, but it doesn’t develop any discernment. Discernment comes from figuring out what’s right, what’s working, what’s not working—and if something’s not working, what could you do otherwise? How can you reframe the question to see things from another angle? Because that ability to reframe things is going to be really important all along the …
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