Search results for: "Discernment"

  1. Page 62
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. The Need for Evaluation
     … Without that process of evaluation, no discernment is going to arise.
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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.
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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