Search results for: "Discernment"
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- The Uses of the Breath… You’ve got to have the mind feeding off the breath, feeding off its concentration, feeding off its mindfulness and discernment so that you can have the strength then to step back from things. Otherwise, if the mind is starved, it’s like scientists running an experiment. You’ve got monkeys in the experimental room, and the scientists been given a grant to buy …
- Battling Darkness… The qualities of insight, discernment, wisdom are like a sword. They cut through all the confusion, they cut through all the connections that keep those defilements together, that keep them strong. As you get to know the movements of your mind, you begin to see that there are lots of little events in the mind that you tie together. You connect this one with …
- The Four Precepts… At the same time, when you’re working in a purely internal way on the mind, trying to develop mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment, you’re not the only one who benefits. When you show more restraint in your actions, other people are freed from a lot of harm that could otherwise come from you. When you don’t act on greed, anger, and …
- Empathetic Joy… That old idea that you have to just put up with whatever’s there if you want to really gain discernment—and you hear this far, far too often—really has nothing to do with what the Buddha taught. He teaches you how to take advantage of whatever the potentials for pleasure and rapture there are. The problem is that if you think that …
- Subduing Greed & Distress… As the Buddha said, if your mind is expansive, if you’ve developed discernment around how to not be overcome by pleasure and not be overcome by pain, and you can extend thoughts of goodwill to everybody, then the impact of past bad actions is going to be a lot less. This is why the brahmaviharas are another way of dealing with greed and …
- Pain & Patience… But still, you can make it easier for yourself, if you’re discerning. If simple patience on its own could take people to awakening, as Ajaan Chah once pointed out, all the chickens in the world would have been awakened before human beings, because they can sit very patiently on their eggs for long hours. There’s patience in sitting with pain, either physical …
- An Exercise in Freedom… The mind is capable of developing mindfulness, alertness, conviction, persistence, concentration, discernment, goodwill—all kinds of good qualities. The more you exercise these qualities, the greater your range of freedom, the greater your range of choice. But the Buddha starts with basics. He starts with a basic problem that’s totally self-evident, that there is suffering and we don’t like it. There …
- Consistently on the Path… Develop your ingenuity so that you can gain the rewards of discernment. When you can perceive the path as something enjoyable, that makes it a lot easier for you and for the people around you. So remember these three things that have to circle around the path to keep it going: right view, right mindfulness—mindfulness as a governing principle—and right effort in …
- Appropriate Attention… That’s where discernment comes—not from knowing the terms, not from being able to label things correctly. It comes from being sensitive: “There’s stress there. Why is there stress?” One of Ajaan Suwat’s most striking talks was when he talked about getting the mind into concentration: He was saying that wherever there’s stress in the concentration, that’s where avijjā …
- Heedfulness… A large part of discernment is just this: sorting out what’s skillful in the mind, what’s unskillful, and then doing what you can to give rise to the skillful and to abandon the unskillful. If you deny that anything unskillful is there, how are you going to abandon it? If you’re not willing to judge what’s skillful and unskillful, you …
- Two Kinds of Middle… You tune your conviction, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment to the level of effort you can manage. In that way your practice stays in tune. In this case, the middle is a midpoint on a continuum. You can slide up or down the continuum and it’s not all that difficult. The question of how much you push, how much you pull back: There are …
- Withstanding Pleasure & Pain… As the Buddha says, if you’re developed in body, developed in mind, developed in virtue and discernment, and you make your mind unlimited—in other words, with the brahmavihāras—the results of past karma can come, but they don’t have to have an impact on the mind. In fact, in some cases, you scarcely feel them at all. In other cases, where …
- The Best Place to Practice… But even then, before you can get out of that situation, you do want to work with your mind, to discover the areas where you can develop virtue, concentration, and discernment to minimize the harm you’re doing to yourself and to other people. But otherwise, when you find the mind gazing far off, wanting to go practice over the ocean—and maybe someday …
- The Complexity of Pain… It’s through the development of virtue, development of discernment, development of mind and body, as he calls it: basically, learning how not to be overcome by pain or overcome by pleasure. That’s part of the key right there. When we allow ourselves to be overcome by pleasure, then there’s an opening to be overcome by pain, too. So, you have to …
- You’re Already Dead… Then there’s discernment, the ability to see things arising and passing away in the mind, so that you can understand what’s skillful and what’s not, what needs to be developed, what needs to be abandoned. All these things are treasures. These are the things that stick with you even after you die. Working from the perspective of death, these are the …
- Sophisticated Dhamma… virtue, concentration, and discernment. So it’s interesting to think about why the Buddha added respect for concentration. It’s included in the training, but why is it singled out as being the most important of the three? It’s because we tend not to respect it. Some people tell us to have respect for vipassana, or respect for insight, but no respect for …
- Be Heedful & Think… Pañña means discernment. And the combination in Thai means intelligence. It goes together with another Pali word, patibhana, that Ajaan Fuang liked to use a lot. In Thai it’s patiphaan, and it means using your ingenuity, using your imagination. When you come up against an obstacle, how can you get around it? Is it an obstacle you have to go through? Is it …
- Serial Clinging Is Still Clinging… You have to remember that discernment is always strategic. The Buddha’s not just describing the way things are for the sake of the description. He’s telling you, “Think in these ways, up to this point, and then you’re going to have to abandon those ways.” But in the meantime, hold on and be consistent. Now, the only clinging that the Buddha …
- Right & Wrong Decisions… mindfulness, alertness, discernment, truthfulness. Meditation helps develop many of those qualities as you develop skill in dealing with the breath, develop skill in learning how to keep the mind here in the present moment with the breath. Even when other things in life are uncertain, you can know for sure where the breath feels good, where it doesn’t feel good. That’s something …
- The Flowing Mind… As the Buddha said, one of the important aspects of discernment is seeing things as separate. You don’t identify with the flow; you see it as something separate, and that’s how you can begin to understand it. So give yourself a good, solid place to stay here as things flow past. The image the Buddha gives is, again, of a river flowing …
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