Search results for: "Discernment"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Awakening Is in the Details… As the Buddha said, discernment is a matter of seeing things as separate, but not totally separate. Once you see that they are separate things, you can begin to see, “Oh, this is how they interact. This is how they’re related. This is how one thing depends on another.” If they’re a big glob, you can’t see those relationships. When you …
- 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 …
- Therapeutic Seclusion… When the Buddha talks about the discernment of arising and passing away, he calls it “penetrative”. That’s what we want to have: penetrative knowledge. To be penetrative, your knowledge has to see what’s causing the arising and what the varieties are. Some things that arise and pass away are good things that should arise and should not pass away. You can cultivate …
- 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 …
- Stop Weaving… So we use these skills that we develop in meditation—the concentration and the discernment—so that whatever suffering or stress comes up in your lives, it stops right there. There’s no need to pass it on, no need to add one last word. Let it stop in midsentence. Let the basket stop halfway down, because it wasn’t a good basket to …
- Memory & Motivation… happen in the future, but you do know that whatever unexpected things come up, you’re going to need mindfulness, you’re going to need alertness, you’re going to need discernment to deal with them. You’re going to need a strong determination to do what’s skillful. Well, those are the qualities we’re working on developing right now. So what we …
- Cleaning Out the Stables… But you’ve still got work to do in terms of concentration and discernment, and you need a lingering sense of “I am” to do the work, because without that sense of your capabilities, without the sense that you’re going to benefit, you can’t do anything. To get rid of the unnecessary selves, you have to realize how deeply embedded they are …
- The Steadiness of Your Gaze… It’s the basis for allowing discernment to arise — because you’re right here, and when you’re right here watching what’s happening, you can’t help but see. The problem is we’re all too often not here. Our gaze has been diverted. Our attention has slipped off someplace else. So keep zeroing in on the breath, zeroing in on the breath …
- Goodwill Permeates the Dhamma… The Buddha lays out some principles out for us in terms of generosity, virtue, and meditation, or virtue, concentration, and discernment. But for a lot of things, we’re going to have to depend on our own powers of observation: looking at our actions, looking at our intentions, being very honest with ourselves about our intentions. Don’t do anything that you anticipate would …
- True for What Purpose?… The same with discernment: As the Buddha said, you could focus on how pleasant feelings and perceptions can be, or how much fun it is to engage in thought fabrication. As he admitted, these things do have their pleasures, but focusing on them in that way just gives rise to more passion, aversion, and delusion. Instead, you could focus on their drawbacks: that no …
- To Depend on Yourself… So those two discernment factors help each other along. As you exercise them together, they get stronger and stronger. So as Ajaan Suwat used to say, if you don’t believe anybody, at least believe the Buddha, because his intentions are totally compassionate. There are lots of people in the world who want to tell us how to live our lives. The question again …
- The Buddha’s Rules of Order… Of all the different rules of order, this is the one that involves the least discernment and the most force of will. You’ll find that it’ll work only for a little while, but at least it gives you some space in the mind where you can get back to the breath. One you can think of the word buddho. You can even …
- Push Yourself… This is how discernment develops. In the meantime, you have to go on conviction. It’s not the case that in every day and in every way, the practice is going to get better and better, easier and easier. There will be ups and downs. There will be long fallow periods. How you handle those fallow periods is what tests your mettle as a …
- Joy & Discontent… re going to have to let go, about what choices you’ll be need to be prepared to make, about how to develop the mindfulness you need, how to develop the discernment you’ll need, so that as the time comes to leave this body, and options are open to you, you want to choose the right options. At the very least, choose a …
- Near to the Buddha… When you learn to develop qualities of mindfulness, alertness, ardency, concentration, discernment around the breath, then every time you breathe, there they are, right nearby. In this way, you become a real friend to yourself. The reason we fall for bad friends outside is because we’re not really friendly to ourselves, we can’t really depend on ourselves. We think we can find …
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