Search results for: "Discernment"
- Page 61
- Freedom Through Painful Practice… He said if you can learn to look at the pains of life, look at the sufferings of life, and gain discernment, you can free yourself from them. In that way, they’re your friends. As for your cravings, you have to learn how to dissociate yourself from them and be very leery of what they’re telling you. Otherwise, they, to use Ajaan …
- The Food of Feelings… Conviction can be food for the mind, as can persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. It may seem artificial to create these things, but the Buddha’s analysis of feeling shows that it’s pretty artificial, too—the belief that our feelings are the raw data of experience, the raw data of who we are. In the final analysis, the Buddha said there are potentials …
- Seclusion… If you’re in a too great a hurry to do your discernment work—trying to figure this out, figure that out—after a while you find you’ve run out of food. Things get dry. Things gets scattered. So, knowing that the mind has to depend on a source of food, make concentration your food. The sense of ease, the sense of fullness …
- Patience & Hope… We’re developing the skills of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency; the skills of concentration and discernment, that will allow us not to be overcome by the results of past actions, and to see our way clear—that regardless of what situation we find ourselves in, we can choose the skillful way out. As the Buddha says, some of us are born in darkness, some …
- Two Kinds of Cross-Questioning… That’s how you develop your discernment, the kind of discernment that actually does lead to release. And it’s the release the counts. So keep this in mind. You’re not just trying to force your mind into a mold. You’re learning the skills you need in order to test things for yourself. That’s how your doubts can come to an …
- Heedful of Ruts in the Mind… conviction, persistence—persistence is right effort—right mindfulness, right concentration, and the discernment of right view and right resolve. Everything good comes out of heedfulness. So always keep that quality uppermost in your mind.
- Values… In the process of developing the path, we’re going to be developing skillful qualities, learning how to abandon the things that get in the way of knowledge and to encourage qualities like mindfulness and alertness that strengthen your knowledge, strengthen your awareness, strengthen your insight and discernment. These things, like the defilements, are not part of the nature of the mind. Ajaan Lee …
- Being Somebody, Going Somewhere… We need them in order to practice the precepts, to develop the mind in concentration, to develop our discernment, because we have to be conscious that everything we do—even just being in the present moment, keeping our thoughts focused on the present moment—is going to take us someplace. Thoughts don’t just sit there. They move, they have an arrow, they have …
- A Unified Committee… The conditions for discernment arising are truths you’re going to have to make happen. You have to learn how to ask the right questions once the mind is gathered together. That’s a type of fabrication. It’s something you have to put together, something you have to make happen. And all of that depends on conviction. So you have to be convinced …
- The Uses of Pleasure… You get more discerning. There’s that passage in Ajaan Lee where he says you want to get to the point where you can think of pleasure and pain as words that people speak in jest. You don’t take them all that seriously. We tend to be very serious about our pleasures. We need to see that the pleasures even of concentration, the …
- Conviction & Truth… How true are you in following the precepts? How true are you in developing concentration, discernment, and all the big and little qualities of the mind that go along with the path? You want to check yourself all-around to see if you are really following the path all-around. Are there some really big blind spots in your practice, or in yourself? You …
- Conspiracies in the Mind… Wherever you go in life, you’re going to need more mindfulness, more alertness, more discernment, more integrity. So the fact that you’re asked to develop these qualities is not a waste, even if it turned out that there never really was a Buddha, just a bunch of monks sitting around thinking things up for the fun of it. Someone once said, “Whether …
- Keep Things Simple… That’s the sign of a discerning person: You make the most of what you’ve got. It may be a lot or it may be a little, but it’s what you’ve got. It may change from day to day, so be alert to that, be sensitive to that. Accept whatever difficulties there may be in the situation and do the best …
- Practice in Dying Well… If you’ve clearly seen with your discernment the dangers of going to places like that, it’s a lot easier to avoid them. Lots of people have mentioned to me that since the pandemic began, and they have lots more time to themselves, past events have loomed much larger in their minds. There’s not much gratification coming in to the present moment …
- Noble Priorities… You can develop mindfulness, ardency, alertness, concentration, discernment from what you’ve got inside to put an end to the suffering. That may seem like a selfish quest: It’s your own suffering and not anybody else’s. But when you see someone who’s approaching death and they’re in a torment and you can’t help, it’s a huge burden on …
- Hypocrisy… That requires very precise discernment, and it can’t come from a mind that’s used to sweeping things under the rug. So, as meditators, we should be careful in all areas of our lives, in terms of what we eat—not so much a matter of what we think we need, it’s more of how we eat, the attitude we have toward …
- Sensitivity All the Time… the qualities of mindfulness, alertness, discernment — all the good qualities we’re working on here. You want to bring them more and more to bear on what you’re doing in every situation. They get stronger and stronger, and they give you the sensitivity you need to cut through any defilements you encounter. They give you the sensitivity you need to find more stable …
- The World Offers No Shelter… virtue, concentration, and discernment—and even before that, with the bases of merit: generosity, virtue, developing goodwill. Even though these things are not permanent, they can take you to a place that does not get swept away. In the meantime, they provide you with a certain amount of stability—stability that the world outside cannot provide. Not only the world outside, even your own …
- Samatha, Vipassanā, Jhāna… The whole point about getting the mind into concentration to give rise to discernment is not just to check off the boxes, that you’ve got this factor or that factor all taken care of. It’s in trying to master concentration that you’re going to gain a sense of what exactly a perception is, what a thought fabrication is, and so on …
- A Multilingual Mind… where the elements that lead to unskillfulness — lack of mindfulness, lack of discernment, lack of concentration — come in. You begin to catch them. It’s like learning another language. You don’t forget your original language, it’s just that you learn how to function on another level, in a new context. And people who become bilingual begin to notice that they have a …
- Load next page...
