Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. Looking Off to the Side
     … We’ve developed our powers of virtue, concentration, and discernment, which as we circle in on the present moment allow us to see more and more. One of the reasons we focus on the breath is because it’s very close to that element of intention which is so important to understand. The breath is a bodily fabrication, which means that there’s an … 
  10. Not Pained by Pain
     … This, the Buddha said, is how you gain discernment—you see things as separate. The things that the mind used to glom together, glue together, you begin to see really are individual moments, separate events. When you cut them down into individual moments like this, they’re a lot more bearable. You’re not carrying them around. That’s another perception we often have … 
  11. Balancing Effort & Patience
     … just mindfulness, say, or just concentration, or just discernment, but it doesn’t work that way. If there were any optional or unnecessary factors in the path, the Buddha wouldn’t have included them in the path to begin with. There would be no reason for him to include them. As six-factored path would be easier to teach than an eight-factored one … 
  12. Comfort Dhamma
     … You need this sense of comfort because a lot of the discernment teachings are going to be like medicine. They may be a little harsh and hard to take. But they’re a lot easier to take if you’ve got a sense of well-being going in the mind, in the body. The Buddha’s going to be handing us a lot of … 
  13. Right Here, Right Now
     … Stay right here and develop mindfulness right here, develop alertness right here, concentration, discernment: all right here: right here in the heart; right here in the present moment. Because everything we’re going to have to learn is right here. All the things we have to come to understand are right here. The Buddha talked about sankharas, fabrications, as being the main focus of … 
  14. Concentration Isn’t Dumb
     … Ajaan Fuang made a comment one time that the people who find concentration easy find discernment hard because they’re used to not thinking. They’re not very much involved in the world around them. They can just let it go. Which is okay, as long as they can let it go. But then there come times when they are involved. Issues come up … 
  15. Where Your Mind Gravitates
     … It’s a question of discernment. You can’t just browbeat the mind into not having lust or not having anger. You have to understand where it was coming from to begin with—why it was gravitating in that direction, and what the gravitational pull was. When you finally see it—and you see that it was based on some really stupid ideas—that … 
  16. Take Care of Your Tools
    The things we do in the practice—learning to be generous, virtuous, developing concentration, even developing discernment—are all tools, means to an end. One of our problems is that once we understand that they’re tools, we tend not to take very good care of them. We think, “It’s just a tool. I’m using it for the sake of something else … 
  17. The Demands of Goodwill
     … That’s the duty of wisdom or discernment. So goodwill can play a large role in the practice, but it’s not everything. One of the people in the course commented, “Well, I guess you could say that goodwill is a complete practice but it needs some other things as well.” Everybody in the room laughed. It’s like saying that rice is a … 
  18. Expert’s Mind
     … And in exploring that issue for yourself, you gain a lot in terms of discernment as well. You’re not simply memorizing what’s in books, but then, at the same time, you’re not just making wild leaps without any sense of background or help from anybody else at all. It’s learning how to use the lessons from the past and to … 
  19. Learning from Sensual Desire
     … That’s what the Buddha means when he says that discernment is what sees through them: It outwits them. So both the heart and the mind are needed to train both the heart and the mind. It’s only when the training is total like this, dealing with all your mental functions—all of your thinking functions, all of your willing functions—that the … 
  20. Comparing Mind
     … Certain causes lead to certain results, and a large part of discernment lies in seeing the connection between causes and results—and having a sense of which ones are better. As you learn to ask yourself these questions, it gets you out of the dullness of a concentration that’s just sitting there getting drowsier and duller and drowsier and duller. You have to … 
  21. Single-minded Determination
     … Not only is a lot of effort wasted in creating that happiness, but sometimes in order to maintain it you also start doing things that go against the precepts, that go against the principles of morality, concentration, and discernment, so that your conditioned happiness causes suffering not only in passing away but also in leading to all kinds of bad things down the road … 
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