Search results for: "Discernment"
- Page 63
- 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 …
- Respect for the Training… The training is very basic—virtue, concentration, discernment—and in some cases it’s so basic we tend to overlook it. We want to go to the higher Dhamma, things that are more abstract that seem to be more in line with our level of intelligence. As a result, we tend to miss a lot of the really good lessons that can be learned …
- The Power to Transcend Suffering… I finally realized that pañña actually meant discernment. Everybody’s got some discernment, the ability to make distinctions and weigh them. The Buddha doesn’t ask you to use anything you don’t have. It’s all right here. It’s just learning how to make the best use of what you’ve got. In the beginning, you’re sort of fiddling around with …
- A Full Life… We have the gratification of mastering the skills of the mind—mindfulness, concentration, discernment. We have the happiness of having meaning in our lives. You look at the universe—galaxies forming and dissolving, stars coming and then exploding, sending their matter spewing out into space. Then the matter coalesces again, it forms stars again, and it repeats the process over and over and over …
- Success by Approximation… Even though awakening can happen in a moment, and you’re awakening to something that’s potentially right here in the present moment, you still have to develop your discernment to detect these things, and that takes time. You have to develop your skill. As with any skill, it’s going to go through levels of refinement. And it includes factors that are very …
- The Purity of Your Intentions… Some of the reasons come from your discernment, such as thinking in the long term, that this will be good for you in the long term. Others are more immediate. If you can learn how to breathe in a way that meets the needs of the body, the needs of the mind, it’s going to be a lot easier to stay, to hold …
- Swept Downstream… Where are you going to go? What are you going to do? That’s the challenge of discernment. But at the very least, get to that island. That should be your main concern every day as you wake up. It’s only then that you can begin to rely on yourself and keep your nostrils above the water flowing past.
- Rewriting the Mind’s Song… And that’s an important part of discernment right there.
- Breathaholic… The ultimate goal of the practice is to use the breath as a means for settling down so that it can discern its defilements and gain release. But to get the mind settled down, you focus your attention completely on the breath to begin with. As Ajaan Fuang used to say, “You have to be crazy about meditation if you want to do it …
- Truth in Action… We’re true to our knowledge; we’re true to our discernment. It’s when you make up your mind to do something good and skillful, and you stick with it, maintain that determination. Being true to that determination: That’s the quality of truth. So truth here is not just a quality of statements, it’s a quality of a person, a quality …
- Endurance… The same with discernment: You have to see which forms of stress are things that you simply have to put up with in life, and which ones you can change. If you can’t put up with the effects of inconstancy, stress, and not self, you’ll never get to focus on what the real problems are—which is not the fact that those …
- Chewed Up by Your Food… conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. This way, the mind, more and more, can stand on its own two feet. And unlike the body, the mind—when it feeds off mental food, off the food of the path—eventually reaches the point where it doesn’t need to feed anymore. With the body, you always need to keep it well fed. The mind, though …
- Preparing for Death… what the Buddha calls training in heightened virtue, heightened awareness, heightened discernment. That’s because they really do take the mind to another level. They’re probably the most basic teaching in the Buddha’s arsenal, and the reason they’re basic is because they’re so useful in so many ways, especially when dealing with the big issues of life and death: learning …
- Why Limit Yourself?… There was also discernment, his ingenuity, figuring out new ways of approaching the problem when the old ways hadn’t worked. He finally came to realize that looking at the desire in and of itself, looking at the intention in and of itself, was going to be a large part of the solution. So he started paying attention to his intentions. He was able …
- Load next page...
