Search results for: "Discernment"

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  2. Refuge
     … here. It’s just a matter of your making the choice that this is what you want to do. Virtue hasn’t been close off. Concentration hasn’t been closed off. Discernment hasn’t been closed off. They’re all here; they’re all open. It’s just a question of your giving them priority. You decide if you really do want to find … 
  3. For What It’s Worth
     … You need the stillness, but you also need the quality of discernment, watching yourself in action so that you can judge what’s worth doing and what’s not. So you have stillness, mindfulness, alertness: These are the things that make you a reliable judge. After all, a lot of the insights, when they come along, don’t come with a certification that this … 
  4. Warm Your Heart
     … After all, acts of merit—generosity, virtue, developing universal goodwill—are the first answer to the question that the Buddha says lies at the beginning of discernment, wisdom: “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Think about the wisdom there: One, you see that happiness is going to depend on your actions. Two, long-term is possible … 
  5. Purity of Heart
     … We strengthen the mind in our conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment. When these qualities are developed, the mind reaches the point where it doesn’t have to depend on any kind of food at all for its happiness. They say that arahants have understood food, and they’re totally independent of nutriment, and, as a result, you can’t trace their path, in … 
  6. The Right Medicine
     … This is concentration developed through discernment or concentration developed through what they call vimansa, which can be translated as your powers of analysis, ingenuity, basically the active side of the intellect. So concentration isn’t always just a matter of forcing things into stillness. Sometimes, to develop it, you have to examine it. This requires a certain amount of balance. If you analyze it … 
  7. Concentration Develops Right View
     … That’s why the path is gradual, as you gradually develop your powers of discernment, based on training the mind to be quiet. The image they give in Thailand is of being a hunter: If the hunter makes a lot of noise, moves around, shifting his spot again and again, the animals all run away. If the hunter wants the animals to come to … 
  8. Lift Your Mind
     … The Buddha’s image for discernment is a person who climbs a tower and looks down on the people below. Here, “looking down” doesn’t mean despising them or having disdain for them, but just seeing what’s going on with a sense of being separate, seeing the larger patterns that are hard to see when you’re down on the same level with … 
  9. Skills Needed at Death
     … It requires a lot of mindfulness, a lot of discernment, but these are precisely the things we develop as we point the mind at the breath and keep it there. At the moment of death, you will have to leave the breath, but you will have learned a lot about the mind in the meantime. That should be enough to keep you headed in … 
  10. Look after Yourself Happily
     … And two, it does require a certain amount of insight and discernment in order to protect your concentration. Once the mind gets still, then you can see the other currents of the mind and see where they’re flowing. It’s like being in a train station. Sometimes you sit in a train and you look over and see there’s another train moving … 
  11. A Memorial to Your Life
     … It’s basically virtue, concentration, and discernment. We hear so much about how craving is a bad thing in the Buddha’s eyes, but there is the desire that’s part of right effort, and here it’s one of the bases of success. The trick, of course, is to desire the right things and to focus your desire properly on the causes, not … 
  12. Hindrances Based on Delusion
     … The only way you’re going to undercut these hindrances is through developing this kind of discernment. So watch over your meditation. See if it’s heading off into too much energy or too little energy. The cure for too much energy, the Buddha said, is getting things concentrated, getting them serene or tranquil and developing a sense of equanimity. But to get the … 
  13. A Promise to Yourself
     … As you can imagine, discernment is also a promise you make to yourself. You could sit there and just bliss out in the concentration and decide, “Well, this is good enough for me.” But then you have to remember what the Buddha said about fabricated happiness. The fact that you’re sitting here with the mind quiet, nothing happening, is not going to last … 
  14. A World Apart
     … What you need most at times like that are powers of alertness, mindfulness, discernment, and concentration. These are precisely the skills you’re developing as you stay with the breath and work with the breath so that it becomes a good place to stay. So how does the breath feel right now? Does it feel like something you can stay with comfortably, or are … 
  15. Appreciating Merit
    There’s that chant we have at the end of every chanting session: “Through the power of all the Buddhas, all the Dhamma, all the Sangha, may you forever be well.” What is that power? Where does it come from? The Buddha gained his power from his generosity, his virtue, and his meditation, developing concentration, developing discernment all the way to nibbana. As did … 
  16. Stay Centered
     … Real discernment sees connections, both the causes and the effects, and the only way you’re going to see those connections is if you watch continually. And this is the spot to watch.
  17. Taking Stock
     … You’ve got the potential for virtue, concentration, discernment. It’s simply a question of learning to develop these potentials. Of course, you’ll find, as you look in your mind, there are a lot of other potentials as well, a lot of less skillful potentials. You’ve probably had some practice in developing those, too. But it’s important that you realize you … 
  18. Part III : Daily Life
     … So as you feed yourself with a sense of well-being inside that comes both from the inner sense of physical well-being that you can maintain with the breath, and the mental well-being that comes as your mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment get stronger, your food-source gets more secure. You find yourself taking less and less from the world, and having … 
  19. The Importance of Being Focused
     … This means that the primary ability you’re going to need will be this ability to stay focused, to be mindful, to be alert, so that you can use your discernment to deal with the situation as skillfully as possible. So as you’re sitting here, keep reminding yourself of the importance of being focused, maintaining a focus, and of whatever skills you can … 
  20. The Good We Already Have
     … a sense of “knowing” that has no discernable limits. It’s all there. What makes the difference is simply your ability to stay tuned in the right way that will nourish these useful qualities. In other words, they’re always there, but the question of being able to tune in to them when you need them – that’s what you’ve got to work … 
  21. A Good Mood to Meditate
     … Remind yourself also that you’re following a good path, the path of the Buddha’s teachings—virtue, concentration, discernment—which harms no one. It helps foster good qualities in the mind. It’s a path that was found by people without defilements and taught by people without defilements who, when they taught it, had no ulterior motives are all. They had found what … 
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