Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. Mange in the Mind
     … You’re taking the concentration and discernment and mindfulness that you’ve been developing. That all goes with you. Then all the potential for insight goes with you as well because you’ve done your inner exploration first. So if you’re going to wander or travel, wander and travel here in your body. Because that’s that kind of wandering that actually takes … 
  3. In Restraint Is Strength
     … So here’s an opportunity to strengthen your discernment. You realize that the things that clutter up the mind come from the senses. Something you’ve never seen, never heard of, or never thought of: It’s not going to clutter up the mind. Even though there may be things that you’ve seen and heard or thought of way in the past, if … 
  4. Pleasure on the Middle Way
     … And a lot more discernment. And a lot less desperation. So the pleasure of concentration is an important part of the path. You can’t do without it. Sometimes you hear that right concentration is an optional part of the path, that you can just go straight for insight. But that’s like that saying they have in Thailand, which is something of a … 
  5. True Values
     … Then there’s learning, generosity, discernment: These are all good things, good wealth, solid wealth, reliable wealth. So if you want to be wealthy, this is where you should look. As for status, genuine status doesn’t come from being put in a position of power outside. It comes from having power over your own mind, your own ability to say No to your … 
  6. True to the Teachings
     … When the Buddha talked about the fact that it’s possible to put an end to that, Añña-Kondañña followed the path of practice, and in his particular case, he had already developed strong powers of concentration, so he worked mainly on discernment, seeing how his cravings were the causes suffering and how he could put a stop to those cravings. So there are … 
  7. The Pursuit of Happiness & Goodness
     … This, too, develops your discernment, develops your alertness, develops your ardency. To begin just getting the mind into concentration, pursuing this particular type of pleasure, requires certain qualities of character. And these qualities are going to serve you in good stead as you go to higher and higher levels, because the pleasure gets more refined, goes deeper, gets more alluring, and there is a … 
  8. Mindful All the Way
     … Ideally, of course, if you can develop the qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and discernment, you can decide you don’t want to come back at all. But failing that, come back to a place where you keep on practicing. The best way to create the opportunities to do that, of course, is just to keep on practicing as you go through life. So as … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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