Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. Imagine Your Breath
     … It’s the discernment faculty in your concentration. You begin to see fabrication. You begin to see how it can be used to energize the body, to calm the body, to energize the mind, to calm the mind. You come to realize that you’ve got a lot more leeway here in the present moment for making this a much better place to be … 
  3. Safe at Home
     … They can help give rise to discernment, give rise to concentration, give rise to understanding. They can be very useful. Others are not so useful, so you have to learn how to figure out which is which so that you can really be in control of your mind. The best place to see them is right here in the present moment. They tend to … 
  4. The Buddha Didn’t Play Gotcha
     … A weakness in your concentration and a weakness in your discernment make you think that way. If your concentration is really solid, you can stay in all kinds of difficult situations and maintain your balance. Or even if you get knocked off balance in the areas where you’re still attached, you can get back into balance a lot more easily if you’ve … 
  5. A Refuge from Karma
     … You train the mind in virtue, you train it in discernment, so that it doesn’t have to suffer from things. You train it not to be overcome by pleasure or pain. You do that through the concentration. You can sit here, and everybody has had this experience: You start out meditating and there’s a pain here and a pain there. Your immediate … 
  6. Learning from the Precepts
     … understanding things in terms of the three characteristics and other aspects of discernment. Now, you find this not at all in the Canon. Every time the Canon talks about alertness or sampajañña, it means knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it. The commentary says, though, “Well, everybody knows what they’re doing while they’re doing it. Even jackals know that … 
  7. Things Don’t Have to Be This Way
     … This includes an element of discernment: trying to figure out, “What kind of breathing can the mind stay with? What kind of breathing feels comfortable? What way of conceiving the breath makes it easy to keep in mind? What way of conceiving the breath makes the breath comfortable?” To answer these questions, you experiment. Ajaan Lee recommends thinking about the breath energy throughout the … 
  8. Safety All Around
     … So it’s a pleasure that allows you to see the mind clearly and puts you in a position where you can move on to the next training, which is the training in heightened discernment: basically, seeing things in term of the four noble truths. What’s noble about the truths? They force you to question your clinging and your craving. Otherwise, you’re … 
  9. Concentration Food
     … This is why Ajaan Lee places ardency, among those three qualities, under the heading of discernment. You’re wise enough to realize that we’re not just here to watch. We’re here to make a difference, and the desire to make a difference in a skillful way is part of the path. It’s to be developed. Craving simply to have things be … 
  10. Keep the Mind from Wandering
     … This is the discernment that comes through the practice of concentration. Ultimately, you get to the point where you have to learn how to outgrow the food even in the concentration, but until you reach that point—and it’s going to quite a while before you reach that point—learn to appreciate the food you’ve got here, the potential home you’ve … 
  11. The Limits of Control
     … This is not only to give the mind a pleasant dwelling place, but also to develop more mindfulness and more discernment. It’s easier to be mindful when your sense of the breath in the body feels really good. It’s easier to stay with it for long periods of time. So you want to take advantage of that. It’s easier to see … 
  12. Delight in Striving
     … You develop your powers of concentration and discernment so that you can be a more reliable observer and see things clearly. These are all good things to be doing. You look at the things that other people are doing in the world right now to make themselves happy, and they can make you despair. So take joy in the fact that we have this … 
  13. The Primacy of the Mind (2)
     … In the first tetrad of the instructions for breath meditation, the Buddha has you start out by discerning short breathing and long breathing. That should alert you to the fact that the way you breathe will have an impact on how you experience the body. Of course, short and long can be extended to include deep, shallow, heavy, light, fast, slow. Get a sense … 
  14. The Heart to Keep Going
     … The soldier has the weapon of discernment, and is fed by concentration. But what keeps the soldier going is that firm determination—a firm desire not to be fooled by greed, aversion, or delusion ever again. That’s your motivation. That’s you right now. And the more you can make that “you” identify with all the thoughts that cluster around that identity, the … 
  15. Knowing & Acting
     … This is how discernment arises from the practice of jhāna. You’re paying very close attention to what you’re doing, you begin to see slight movements in the mind, slight movements in the body, that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Without this point of comparison, things could move and you’d hardly know whether they were moving or not, how fast, in … 
  16. The Wisdom of Incongruity
     … That’s a lot of what the process of discernment is all about: seeing incongruities, where things don’t quite come together, and then using those incongruities for the sake of freedom.
  17. In the Context of the Deathless
     … You look at the things the Buddha asks you to do in terms of virtue, concentration, discernment: They’re all honorable qualities. They’re all things you can be proud to do. Good qualities of the mind. Qualities of the mind that you respect within yourself. The Buddha’s asking you to develop them even further. So there’s a joy in being on … 
  18. Overcoming Complacency
     … Then apply the qualities that come with concentration—mindfulness, alertness, discernment—to see even more subtle levels where you might still be complacent, where you’re still missing cause and effect. Keeping looking and experimenting until you reach the point where you can finally take it all apart. That’s when you’re free. But until you reach that point, constant vigilance is required … 
  19. Attahi Attano Natho
     … You work at it and you find yourself getting more and more perceptive, more and more sensitive, more and more discerning as the practice progresses, as you keep committing yourself to the practice and reflecting on what you’re doing, and then taking what you’ve noticed and plowing that back into your next decision for what to do. So you do look out … 
  20. The Buddha Respects Your Potential
     … In fact, it aids the mind in developing more and more discernment, more and more insight into what’s going on inside itself, to see the even subtler ways in which it’s causing trouble for itself. And when you cause trouble for yourself, you’re going to cause trouble for people outside. So, have some respect for the state of concentration. Have some … 
  21. When You Don’t Like Your Selves
     … Develop your discernment as to how to master those strategies, so that your sense of self comes out and does the things that would really be helpful. When you can put it away, you can replace it with another one and another one as needed, until you finally get to the point where you’ve attained the highest happiness and there’s no need … 
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