Search results for: "Discernment"

  1. Page 70
  2. The Light of the World
     … As he said, wisdom or discernment begins with a series of questions: “What when I do it will lead to my long-term harm and pain? What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What’s unskillful, what’s blameworthy? What’s skillful, what’s blameless?” What’s wise about the questions about long-term welfare and happiness … 
  3. Delight in the Path
     … virtue, concentration, discernment. Another exclamation was, It’s as if the Buddha had taken a lamp into the dark so that those with eyes could see forms. In other words, if you realize that what the Buddha is showing you is something really valuable, you can make use of it. In the past it was dark: What was going on in your mind was … 
  4. This Fathom-Long Body
     … But if you can learn to be discerning and say, “Okay, this is the mental side and that’s the physical side. And just because those hormones are there, keeping your heart rate up, doesn’t mean that the emotion is always there. It comes and goes, comes and goes. But because those hormones are still in your blood, it’s going to take … 
  5. Magha Puja: Showing Respect with the Practice
     … This is where you find your true refuge, in developing their qualities in your mind—qualities of mindfulness, qualities of alertness, ardency, patience, endurance, concentration, discernment. As these qualities get stronger and stronger in the mind, you find that you really can take refuge in them. They provide you with a solid foundation. They lift your mind above its ordinary concerns, lift it above … 
  6. The Identity Crutch
     … As Ajaan Lee once said, a person with discernment can take anything and use it skillfully. So before you start throwing things away willy-nilly see if they have any uses left to them. Think of the Buddha’s image of a bird. The bird’s wings are a burden. They have some weight to them. When the bird’s just sitting around not … 
  7. Defilements as Not-self
     … But as Ajaan Suwat said, when you gain some discernment, it’s like lighting a candle in a dark place—say, in a cave that’s been dark for who knows how long. The darkness doesn’t have any right to say, “This little tiny light has no right to come in and chase us away; we’ve been here before for a much … 
  8. Do. Maintain. Use.
     … Here we measure gain in terms of mindfulness, alertness, ardency, concentration, discernment. Those are very different things. All too often, if you win at the game outside, you’re going to lose at the game inside. You have to ask yourself which game, which set of rules, really has your best interest in mind? It’s pretty amazing that the Buddha taught totally out … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. Intro to Breath Meditation
     … Mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment, all these things: The more you have them, the better.
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
  22. Load next page...