Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Kindfulness… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment, goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity. These are all good qualities to develop. As for the word qualities here, it’s best to think of them as habits you develop in the mind. That’s because it’s more useful to think of the mind in terms of what it’s doing than in terms of what it is …
- Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves… The first is that you’re developed in virtue and developed in discernment. In other words, you learn to see your own mind and understand what’s going on in your own mind. You can talk yourself into doing the things that you know are good but you may not like; and you talk yourself out of doing the things that you may dislike …
- Respect… The gradual slope comes from refining your powers of discernment. As the mind settles down, you’ll see things more clearly, you’ll see where you’re holding on to ideas or feelings that are weighing you down, and you let go of them. But then you’ll find there are other more subtle ones that are also weighing you down. So let go …
- Limitless Compassion, Limited Resources… Is it entangling? Because the more you get entangled with other people, the less time you have to practice concentration, discernment, the direct training of the mind. So this is one of the quandaries: How do you help without getting entangled? You learn from other people’s example. And you realize that the best help you can give to other people is to teach …
- Clinging & Feeding… Then we feed the mind with conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, all of which are good food for the mind. These are the things that strengthen us, so that we can manage the path. So the Buddha doesn’t try to starve us right from the start. He simply tells us to take a different approach to our feeding. Feed on good food …
- Goodwill as a Strength… And you do that through a lack of goodwill, a lack of discernment. So goodwill’s something you have to keep in mind all the time. And as for the battles you fight in the world, choose them well. Choose your battles well. But always fight using goodwill. Remember that it is a strength.
- Right View… Of course, you’ve got to have a lot of mindfulness and alertness to discern the bear’s motives when he’s chewing on you. That’s why the Buddha has us practice mindfulness and alertness as we meditate, not so much in case we’re attacked by bears, but because there are a lot of issues in the world in which the issue …
- Deep Understanding… On the level of listening and thinking, you can hear about mindfulness, you can hear about alertness, you can hear about concentration and discernment, but it’s when you actually try to develop these things in the mind you come up against issues you might not have thought of before, things that weren’t in the plan. And you find that as you develop …
- A Skillful Heart… This means your goodwill has to be backed up by discernment. There are a lot of people who want to have Dhamma without kamma. And so they say, “We have goodwill for all beings because all beings have Buddha-nature or all beings are intrinsically good.” In a case like that, your goodwill is not really independent. When you run across people who are …
- Equanimity as a Factor of Awakening… After all, a lot of the practice of discernment is learning to ask questions. That requires thinking. But what you’re trying to figure out here is which thoughts are the skillful ones and which ones are not. You want to have a basis from which to watch these things. It’s best if that basis is still so that you can see their …
- Monologue on the Breath… In this way, you take the part of the mind that tends to cause so much trouble—its constant chatter—and you train it to be a help, because the directed thought eventually turns into concentration, the evaluation turns into discernment. The two of them working together, focused on this one topic, get stronger and stronger, more and more sensitive, until they lead to …
- More than Just Letting Go… And as you get to know the ways the mind deals with perceptions, that becomes the basis for discernment as well. So that’s the big problem—the processes of fabrication done in ignorance—and to solve it, you have to fabrication a lot of good qualities with knowledge. You’re developing concentration; you’re developing discernment. Eventually, yes, you will have to put …
- Endurance & Contentment… That’s what the Buddha said lies at the essence of discernment: seeing things as separate. You don’t have to identify with them. You can choose your identity; you can choose the voices in the mind that you’re going to side with. So take advantage of that fact. That will make all the difference between whether you’re discontent or content with …
- Living Forward, Understanding Backward… Even more so as you develop more concentration and discernment: You began to separate the mind from its objects. In other words, when pain arises, you’re aware of the pain, but you don’t have to identify with the pain, or with the perception that says, “my pain.” You can cut right through it and you find that letting it drop makes a …
- Judgmental vs. Judicious… As Ajaan Lee points out, this is the beginning of discernment. You’re learning to develop this faculty by success through approximation: not hoping for a perfect judgment right away, knowing that you probably will make mistakes, but being alert to what you’re doing, what you’re assuming—and what you’re doing based on what you’re assuming—and then what the …
- Booster Stages… Then you have to keep watch on how you use those constructive attitudes to get the mind to be stronger, more firmly centered in its conviction, in its persistence, its mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. That’s how this changeable mind of yours can really be trained so that it doesn’t keep destroying itself, so that it can build the path it needs to …
- A Refuge in Quiescence… And it may be that you develop some discernment, gaining some insight into what really is skillful and what really is not. This is where you take the points that you’ve learned to adopt as working hypothesis and actually begin to see: what, when you do it, will lead to happiness; what, when you do it, will lead to suffering—not as a …
- Working with Nature… This requires patience, discernment—all of which are good qualities to develop in the mind. So learn that proper balance. You want the results, but you can’t keep thinking about the results. You’ve got to focus on the path. There’s a teaching in Dogen where he says that the duty of the path, developing the path, is the same thing as …
- Mental Balance… The same holds true with discernment—and, of course, with release, when you don’t have to feed at all anyway. You’re no longer a predator. From that point on, all you have is things to offer to other people: the wisdom you’ve gained, the insights you’ve gained. You’ve got a lot more to share So this is the Buddha …
- The Need for Evaluation… Without that process of evaluation, no discernment is going to arise.
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