Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Clinging… Virtue, concentration, discernment: You hold on to these activities. As for views, you want a view that tells you the importance of action. That’s what mundane right view is all about: that your actions really are real, they have effects, and the effect has to do with the intention behind them. That’s a view of the world that’s really helpful on …
- Be Observant… The words insight or discernment don’t mean learning a general truth about things. They mean seeing very precisely, seeing distinctions. For instance, you may see a pain in the body, but you can also see that there’s suffering in the mind. The two are two different things and they’re caused in different ways. The pain in the body may be a …
- Like Earth and Space… That gives you a good foundation for developing more concentration, more goodwill, all the brahmavihāras, more discernment. You hear some people saying that the non-reactive state of mind is the goal, but that’s just the beginning of the path. Still, it’s your protection in a lot of ways. In the Buddha’s discourse on protection, the Maṅgala Sutta, patience, endurance, is …
- Protection from Fools… Then comes discernment, the ability to see how you can maintain that still state in the midst of your other activities. For most of us, either the mind is very much in meditation or very much out, and there’s no in-between. Or if there is in-between, it’s not skillful. It’s just a mess. We should try to find a …
- Fourth Truth, First Duty… In the beginning, you simply discern how the breath is going in the body right now, whether it’s long or short, but then you train yourself: You train yourself to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out. You train yourself to calm what the Buddha calls bodily fabrication, which is the in-and …
- Straightening Out the World… All the good qualities in the mind—mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment: Without these qualities you get careless; you don’t really see what’s going on, even on the surface level. Something pops into your head and you say it, and then you realize afterwards what you said, but then it’s too late—to say nothing of the things going on deeper in …
- Trustworthy Judgment… mindfulness, alertness, discernment, tranquility. If an idea comes in your mind, you don’t get swept away. You watch it for a while. You think about it. If you were to make that decision, where would it lead you? Go through the steps. If something strange comes into the mind, learn how to recognize it as a strange idea. Several years back when I …
- Heedful of What’s Precious… As he once said, “One day lived mindfully is better than a hundred years lived mindlessly.” One day lived with virtue, one day lived with concentration, one day lived discerning the arising and passing away of your mental states, is better than a whole hundred years of living without doing any of those things. So what’s really precious here, what’s really valuable …
- The Primacy of the Mind (1)… You also create an inner mind-state that conduces to meditation as well—conduces to concentration, conduces to discernment. It’s all of a piece. This is how you organize your response to the facts of aging, illness, and death—how you organize your response to the realization that you are responsible for the suffering that weighs down the mind, which means that you …
- Normalcy… And then it shades into discernment, because you see the normal way of the mind. It’s normally been creating suffering, but you can see a deeper state of normalcy, a state of true well-being that’s very, very subtle, which comes when you’re not creating suffering anymore. So you’ve got to see the normal habits of the mind that have …
- Relating to Kamma… This doesn’t apply only to concentration and discernment. We practice endurance, renunciation, equanimity, determination: all of which are qualities of the will, in which we make up our minds that there’s something we really want and we try to get all our random desires in line. The Thai image is of trying to catch crabs and put them in a basket. You …
- The Gift of Speech… Remember the Buddha’s definition of someone who has the discernment connected with right effort: i.e., there are things you know will lead to suffering down the line, but you like to say them—and so you learn how not to say them. There are things that will lead to good things down the line, happiness down the line, but they may be …
- Victory… Then, once you’re there, you try to develop discernment, and for that, you’ve got to think again. And the Buddha was definitely not a defeatist. We’re here to gain victory over our unskillful habits, to gain victory over the mind’s tendency to create suffering for itself, to allow itself to be ignorant, to allow itself to keep on churning out …
- Delusion Concentration… And you can never let go of what keeps the concentration right, which is your mindfulness, your alertness, and the discernment that you bring as you evaluate things. Those are the things you have to hold on to all the way down through the path, that keep you from wandering off to either side. So be very careful about what you let go of …
- The Joy of Monotasking… All the qualities of concentration and discernment get developed in focusing full attention on what you’re doing and on doing it well—and learning how to appreciate the goodness that comes from that activity, the joy that comes from mastering a skill. That joy then becomes your food on the path, so that everything you’re doing becomes part of the practice, and …
- Uncertainty… Ajaan Fuang said that people who find concentration easy often have trouble with discernment, just as people who are intelligent and tend to be inquisitive have trouble getting their minds into concentration. Or as he put it, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who don’t think enough and those who think too much. The way you’re going to …
- A Slave to Craving… the skill of getting the mind to be still, getting it to be mindful, concentrated, discerning. I know a lot of people who don’t like these teachings because they sound harsh, but the only way you’re going to get the mind out of its complacency is to show it stark reality. You think you’ve got this friend, but it’s your …
- Four Noble Truths to One… You develop, basically the triple training of virtue, concentration, discernment. In the beginning, these duties are four separate duties, but they’re interconnected. After all, as you develop the path, you begin to abandon some of your passion for your craving as your right view begins to see through the things you used to crave. And particularly, as you develop right concentration, that gives …
- Duties… In other words, it’s the practice where you start with being mindful, and then you use your discernment to bring the mind first a sense of energy inside—that can be your food inside, your medicine inside—and then to calm it down. That’s also a kind of medicine, also a kind of a food. And this you develop. This is a …
- Dispassion Is Freedom… Without any passion for the path, it’s hard to develop virtue, hard to develop concentration, hard to develop discernment. So you do concentrate passion on the path. As it says in that chant we have from the Ariyavamsika Sutta, you develop a passion for developing and a passion for abandoning: developing skillful qualities, abandoning the unskillful ones. You want to take your pleasure …
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