Search results for: "Discernment"

  1. Page 69
  2. The Path Has a Goal
     … Based on these attainments, you can develop the discernment that leads to release. What’s the proper attitude to have toward the Buddha’s earlier attainments? First, remember that the Buddha’s early teachers had viewed these attainments as the goal. Once you got there, you just stopped. That was it. You continued practicing these things but that was it. You didn’t take … 
  3. Merit: Goodness of the Heart
     … Who would he teach first? He first thought of teaching his old teachers, the ones who had taught him about conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment as they understood it. He wanted to share what he’d found with them. But it was too late. They had been reborn in states of the cosmos where they were out of touch with everybody. Then he thought … 
  4. From Heedfulness to Purity
     … And the concentration, the mindfulness, allow for the discernment that’s going to allow us to see where the confusion lies, because we begin to see that it really does cause suffering, causes stress one way or another. As you stick with the concentration, it sensitizes you to levels of stress you may not have even noticed before. You just took it as part … 
  5. Intro to Breath Meditation
     … Mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment, all these things: The more you have them, the better.
  6. Your Gyroscope
     … So your protection is both the concentration and the discernment working together. This helps you to maintain your sense of balance, so that things that used to knock you over don’t knock you over anymore. The waves come past, and they just go past. You stay upright as things go up and as things go down. That’s the skill you want to … 
  7. Desire for Happiness
     … This is the beginning of what are sometimes called the wisdom and compassion—more appropriately the discernment and goodwill—that underlie the practice. That’s what starts us out. It’s why we chant these things every day. Now, for most of us, our desire for happiness in a world where there is a lot of suffering often leads us to harden ourselves. We … 
  8. Finding Balance
     … It provides a foundation for really understanding what’s going on in the mind, for learning how to foster skillful qualities and let go of unskillful ones, which is the beginning of discernment, wisdom. This way you develop the qualities of tranquility and insight together. This is how they function ideally. They function in tandem. So you use the insight to improve your concentration … 
  9. Skill
     … This is how your insight develops, how your discernment develops. As you get more sensitive to issues of skill and lack of skill around the breath, you begin to see them in the mind as well. There are skillful qualities in the mind, unskillful qualities in the mind. The more you pursue this question, the more you begin to sense which is which. Some … 
  10. To Gladden the Mind
     … You develop concentration, you develop discernment, and they take you to the point where you can confirm for yourself inside that the Buddha knew what he was talking about—there is a deathless, and it can be attained through human effort. That’s how you overcome your doubts about the Buddha. From that point on, your conviction is confirmed. So the Buddha wasn’t … 
  11. Guided Meditation
     … And an all-around centered awareness like this is ideal for developing insight and discernment. It’s your foundation. You may notice that it has a tendency to shrink. So each time you breathe in, think, “whole body breathing in, whole body breathing out.” And try to maintain that balance between being centered and being expansive—all the way to the end of the … 
  12. A Producer Mentality
     … The bliss of concentration, the bliss that comes with discernment, comes at the end of the five faculties, the end of the five strengths. In both cases, the list starts with conviction. The four bases of success start with desire. The noble eightfold path starts with right view and right resolve: right view about what’s going to cause suffering, what’s not going … 
  13. Mindfulness of Breathing: Four in One
     … You can think of the 16 if you really want to analyze things out for the sake of discernment. But for the time being let’s bring everything together, gather the mind here, give it a place where it can dwell around one thing, the breath. And the more consistently you can stay here, the clearer all those other aspects will become. You begin … 
  14. Exercising the Mind
     … This is one of the ways in which concentration helps to develop your discernment. We create states of mind that are called becoming. It’s like a little world in your mind. As you go into that world, that suddenly becomes your surroundings, that becomes your environment. Then you lose interest in it, or something else comes along, and you create another one. These … 
  15. The Perception of Inconstancy
     … There’s the potential for mindfulness, the potential for concentration, for discernment. With these potentials, you don’t just wait for them to come and go. You actively search out: Which are the skillful potentials? Which are the unskillful ones? Like right now, as you’re meditating, there’s a potential in the breath for there to be a sense of ease, a sense … 
  16. Goodwill Is Respect
     … Sariputta—his foremost student in discernment—could see all kinds of mental activities going on even as the mind settled into very deep stages of absorption. So there are things to observe here. You want to see how you’re putting this state of body and mind together: by the way you breathe, by the way you talk to yourself, by the perceptions you … 
  17. Is the Buddha’s Wisdom Selfish?
     … So the Buddha’s focus on discernment, on wisdom—on the topics of your happiness, your long-term happiness, putting an end to suffering—actually transcend the question of whether they’re selfish or unselfish because they lead to a happiness where these boundaries don’t really matter, and where the goodness gets spread around in the most effective possible way. So as we … 
  18. Meaning & Happiness
     … qualities like generosity, virtue, renunciation. As we’re sitting here right here, right now, that’s a type of renunciation: Renouncing our fascination with sensual pleasures and looking for something deeper. Discernment, endurance, effort, truthfulness, determination good-will, equanimity: These are all good qualities to develop inside. And a life devoted to developing them is a meaningful life. It heads some place. A life … 
  19. Sit with It
     … You’ll have to depend entirely on the strength of the mind—and one of the important strengths is patience, combined with the discernment that allows you to step back and watch what’s going on without feeling that you have to be in what’s going on in the body or in the mind—because you’re going to be making a lot … 
  20. The Flow of Time
     … This is the beginning of wisdom and discernment, when you ask that question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” It’s wise because, one, you realize it’s going to depend on your actions; two, you realize that long-term happiness is possible; and three, you want long-term. So you’ve got to learn how … 
  21. Concentration as a Skill
     … But as Ajaan Lee said, the discernment is not the big problem. Virtue is not the big problem. When you’re working on the path, concentration is the one that’s the big problem. He said it’s like building a bridge across a river. The pilings on this bank and the pilings on that bank are not the problem, but the pilings right … 
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