Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Cleaning up Your Personal Environment… Are you looking for the purpose of greed, or are you looking for the purpose of discernment? Are you looking for the purpose of anger, or the purpose of discernment? Looking for the purpose of discernment means understanding what’s going on in the mind, what sights, sounds, smells, tastes are useful or what ways of looking for these things are useful, to gain …
- The Reality of Emotions… You use it to spur yourself on to actually develop more mindfulness, more concentration, more discernment. Then you can experience the joy of having mastered these skills—and of ultimately gaining release. So renunciate grief is a feeling with a purpose, and you can induce it. The fact that it’s induced doesn’t mean it’s not real or that it’s not …
- Gaining the Dhamma Eye… The same with the practice of concentration, the practice of discernment: We try to bring our minds in line with the instructions to see what happens. In other words, you really put the Buddha’s teachings to the test. That’s one meaning of practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. The other meaning is that you practice for the sake of disenchantment …
- Breath Energies… Ideally, you want to learn how to short-circuit that process by getting your discernment to go directly to the breath so that you can breathe calmly even when the signals in the brain are telling you that there’s something to be feared or to be desired. But when this territory of the breath in the body carries a lot of emotional weight …
- Bare Attention… There are times when you have to fabricate and think and analyze in order to get past a particular unskillful mind state, either by fabricating stronger concentration to resist it or by fabricating discernment to try to figure out ways of getting around the problem— taking it apart, seeing what makes it work, getting down to the nuts and bolts. It’s interesting that …
- Marshalling the Emotions… A lot of the preliminary work in discernment consists of learning how to maintain a sense of stillness, of being centered with a sense of fullness, and learning to adjust it as you need it: learning to gladden the mind when it needs to be gladdened, to release the mind when it needs to be released, to steady it when it needs to be …
- The Karma of Not-self… This resilience that you can develop through the powers of concentration, mindfulness, and discernment is a form of happiness that’s good for everybody: for you and the people around you. So all this is healthy selfing. As for any distractions that come up, any defilements that come up, you learn how not to identify with them, how to let them stop. That’s …
- Pleasure & Pain… That’s because the process of getting the mind to be concentrated, in and of itself, requires some discernment. For example, when you’re dealing with distraction, you want to figure out why the mind gets distracted, why it can lie to itself when it’s about to run away and yet pretend that it’s not going anywhere, that it’s going to …
- Stubborn Clinging… That’s where discernment has to come in. This is why the Buddha taught the four noble truths, why he began the path with the four noble truths: pointing out first that our clinging is suffering. This is the essence of all the mind’s sufferings: its ways of clinging to the five aggregates. The recognition of this suffering—the stress, the pain you …
- Ask the Right Questions… He’s trying to train your discernment, so he gives you an exercise and he asks you to look at how you’re doing the exercise, and whether you’re getting more and more skillful at it. And it’s through gauging the results of your actions that the discernment arises. That’s how discernment gets developed, those are the questions you pose in …
- The Equanimity that Doesn’t Give Up… That way you’ve got concentration working together with discernment. All of these qualities—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—are strengths. They strengthen your equanimity so that it does become that second kind, the kind that’s willing to face the fact that, “There are difficulties, things aren’t going the way I want them to go, there are setbacks, but I’m …
- A Handful of Leaves… After all, we don’t just parrot his discernment. He wasn’t the type of teacher who had a set creed that he would have everybody repeat and that he would repeat to everybody. He would give people teachings right for them, and have them go off and put them into practice, and then reflect to see what results they were getting. As you …
- Developing Absorption… But then this is how you’re going to develop discernment. As you see what’s worth doing, what’s not worth doing, and your powers of judgment get better, that means your discernment gets better. After all, the message of the Buddha is that we’re causing ourselves suffering and we don’t realize it. Sometimes the suffering is subtle. It’s hard …
- Virtue… Are you engaging in any of those kinds of speech? It also involves discernment. There come times when you don’t want to tell the whole truth to somebody, because it might be harmful, yet at the same time you don’t want to lie. So what are you going to do? You have to figure out some way of getting around that whole …
- Prerequisites for the Practice… And finally, discernment, which comes down to seeing where there’s suffering, what it comes from, and how to put an end to it. Here, specifically, the Buddha’s focusing on the causes of suffering inside. There may be external causes for pain and misery in the world, but, as he said, you don’t solve those problems without solving the problem of why …
- Strength from the Basics… generosity, virtue, and meditation; or virtue, concentration, and discernment. Keep focusing on the basics, even when they seem awfully simple. Virtue, for instance, consists of the intention to hold by the precepts, to hold by the rules. It may not feel very creative to hold to rules rather than expressing yourself, but then again there are parts of life where self-expression and creativity …
- Not-self… You develop qualities of virtue, concentration, and discernment so that you can apply them to that problem of why you crave things even though the craving itself causes suffering and stress. After all, suffering is not going to end until you abandon the craving. In fact, that’s what the cessation of suffering is: the total abandoning of craving. So you have to look …
- In a World of Crooked Wheels… It’s through right concentration that your views, which have been made straight—in other words, you hold to right views—actually become your own discernment. When we start out, we borrow the Buddha’s discernment. But through following it and being observant—we commit ourselves to the practice and reflect on what we’re doing—we make it our own. For example, with …
- Secluded from Sensuality… The first two have to do with discernment, the next three have to do with virtue, and the last three have to do with concentration. Those last three are far longer than the others, and are explained in a lot more detail. They really are the heart of the path. They’re what makes the middle way the middle way, because they provide a …
- The Buddha’s Currency… So in this way you’re developing an even higher form of noble wealth—a noble wealth that leads to discernment. You see that you can get the mind still and you can really see clearly what’s going on inside the mind. You gain a sense of which qualities of the mind need to be developed, which ones need to be abandoned. You …
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