Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. Motivation
     … This is what wisdom and discernment are all about. They’re not about arriving at great realizations about the world or whatever. Because wisdom is meant to go further than just a realization, it’s meant to take you to another dimension. It’s a means to an end. It starts out with little means to what seem to be smaller ends, but they … 
  3. Feeding on Open Wounds
     … your generosity, your virtue, your ability to find pleasure outside of sensuality, your discernment, your persistence, your endurance and forbearance, your truth, your determination, your goodwill, your equanimity. As you develop these good qualities, you benefit, and the world benefits as well. It benefits even more when you pull yourself out of the feeding chain and leave good things behind. It’s not as … 
  4. Abandoning Effluents (2)
     … Who’s doing the looking? Greed? Aversion? Or discernment? You want your discernment to do the looking so that it can see things in terms of a causal pattern. If you look at things with the purpose of trying to find something you like, it’s going to aggravate your greed or your lust. You’ve probably noticed how you go through a crowd … 
  5. Equanimity & Action
     … the element of discernment in equanimity. You take stock of your actions—what you’ve been doing, what you are doing—and see what could be changed. Because that recollection on the fact that all living beings are the owners of their actions, etc., is also a reflection for giving rise to heedfulness, giving rise to saṃvega. Heedfulness in the sense that your actions … 
  6. Different Paths Go Different Places
     … all the treasures of conviction, virtue, a sense of shame and compunction, your knowledge of the Dhamma, generosity, discernment, and the food of good concentration. Nobody else can take these things away from you. These are treasures that are safe. The treasures out there in the world, as the Ajaan Lee likes to say, are like the gold chains that people wear around their … 
  7. Truth as Medicine
     … For that, we need to learn to use our discernment. The doctor’s not here, but his medicine is here. And so it’s up to us to figure out which medicines are right for us right here right now, as we practice. So as you approach every aspect of the practice—reading, listening, meditating—treat it all as potentially medicine. Certain medicines, even … 
  8. A Well-thatched Roof
     … The Buddha says when you develop tranquility and insight to a full measure, you develop both awareness-release and discernment-release. Awareness release is when you’re released from passion. This can be passion for pleasure—passion for all kinds of things. But the Buddha was wise enough to see that we’re passionate not only for the pleasures. We’re more directly passionate … 
  9. Unraveling the Present
     … When we try to develop discernment, we focus on pain, and again that’s something very close to home. Focus on stress. Reduce things to basic experiences that you can relate to immediately, because the more you start dealing with abstractions or big metaphysical theories, the further and further you get away from what you’re actually experiencing, and the more room there is … 
  10. Training the Mind
     … How much mindfulness do you bring to it, how much alertness, how much ardency, how much concentration, how much discernment? You want to develop these qualities. It’s like being a good cook. Mediocre cooks need to have really good ingredients in order to come out with good food. Great cooks can take almost anything and turn it into good food because they have … 
  11. A Real Education
     … In Ajaan Lee’s analysis, ardency is the discernment factor among those three. That’s because, if you’re really wise, you realize that your actions are going to make the difference between happiness and pain. So you want to do everything you can to get the mind skillful, to develop skillful qualities in the mind, so that they’ll generate good thoughts, good … 
  12. Trust Your Desire for Happiness
     … You have to develop discernment as to what’s skillful and what’s unskillful. And you have to be compassionate, recognizing that your happiness cannot depend on the suffering of others if it’s going to last. Wisdom, purity, compassion: These are all noble qualities. They grow in the mind that really takes happiness seriously. So you ask yourself, do you really want to … 
  13. Flexibility
     … Otherwise, you don’t develop discernment. So as you meditate, be willing to make mistakes and be willing to learn from them. There are things you do that will lead you to the end of the path. It’s like the road to the Grand Canyon. The road to the Grand Canyon doesn’t look like the Grand Canyon—it’s not red, it … 
  14. Appropriate Attention Plus Admirable Friendship
     … Conviction in the principle of action, in other words, belief that what you do really does matter, really will make a difference, generosity, virtue, and discernment. The Buddha said that one of the advantages of living with a person like that is that you get a good example and, two, you get to hear the Dhamma. But sometimes the examples shout louder than the … 
  15. Not-selfing Your Selves
     … And it’s by focusing all your clinging right here that—when you finally do turn around and look at the concentration itself or look at the acts of discernment that you’ve been doing as part of the concentration—you can begin to see that they, too, are fabricated. They, too, carry a level of stress. The fact that your clinging has been … 
  16. Skills of the Dhamma Wheel
     … Where is the craving, where is the ignorance that underlies that stress? As you do this, you have to learn how to discern which desires you want to hold onto for the time being, and which ones you want to let go of—because the path includes desire as part of right effort, and that’s something you should develop. The path is something … 
  17. Terror & Revulsion
     … mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment, all founded on a sense of pasada or saddha, which means conviction, conviction that your actions can make a difference and that there is a way out. This way, samvega’s paired with heedfulness. You realize that your actions are important and so you have to be very careful about what you do. Because it is very easy to … 
  18. On the Path of the Breath
     … The first two steps are exercises for gaining practice in discerning the breath — discerning when it’s long, discerning when it’s short — to help sensitize you to how the breath feels. When you do that, you begin to notice which kind of breathing feels best. He simply mentions long or short, but there are other qualities you can look for as well: deep … 
  19. The Joy of Curiosity
     … Then as we get older, of course, we get more discerning in what kind of influence we want to have and we can figure out more and more complex things, but there’s a joy in all of that. When you think about the different ways the Buddha talks about self—self as a consumer, self as a producer, and self as a commentator … 
  20. The Breath Soufflé
     … You simply discern when the breath is long, when it’s short. In other words, you’re practicing your skills as an observer. Just try to be with the present moment so that you can see the differences among the different ways you breathe. In addition to long and short, you can try fast, slow; heavy, light; deep, shallow. Just get the mind in … 
  21. Analyzing the Breath
     … This is the kind of concentration that has discernment as one of its integral factors. In terms of the bases of success, it’s the fourth one: concentration based on the powers of analysis. So give it a try. Explore what’s actually happening as you just sit here. The breath comes in, the breath goes out, the breath spins around in place, gets … 
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