Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Honesty… This is where insight comes; this is where discernment arises: not by memorizing what you’ve heard, but learning to develop your own sensitivity to causes and results, to your own actions, and the sense of ease or lack of ease that comes from your own actions. In other words, you learn to take responsibility for your own happiness. The Buddha’s teachings might …
- Compunction & Awe… It’s not just telling you, “Don’t do these things.” He teaches you the mental strengths you need—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—so that you’re strong enough to resist the temptation to do something unskillful, and you can feel more and more secure in yourself. The result of having confidence of this sort is that you behave in a moral way …
- Opportunities Everywhere… Then you can carry those qualities into your meditation, because an important aspect of the practice when you’re trying to develop concentration and discernment is seeing the little weeds in the mind and uprooting them along the way. They may not be the big issues you’ve read about in the books, but wherever there’s a little bit of defilement, you want …
- Ripples Go Far… Develop the members that are focused, the members that are discerning. These are the strengths in your mind. These are the committee members that you really want to encourage. These are the ones that do best when you’re not just watching TV shows in the mind, watching old movies in the mind. They’re the ones that are strengthened when you learn how …
- Right View as Tool… You try to use your discernment as a tool, just as you use all the other elements of the path as tools, and then you put it aside. And as with any tool, you want to learn to use it well. Part of that means when you’re dealing with people who disagree with right view, you don’t use the tool on them …
- Believe in Your Actions… It requires that you be very careful and very alert and very discerning in how you judge your actions and their results. This is why motivating yourself to practice is a constant requirement. You have to keep reminding yourself of why you’re doing this. When you find your energy flagging, what can you do to get your energy back up? Whether you’re …
- Home Schooling Your Inner Children… As the Buddha said, a real test of your discernment is seeing the things that you like to do that are going to give trouble in the long run, and learning how to talk yourself out of them. The same with the things that you don’t like to do, but are going to be good for you in the long run: like meditating …
- The Pleasure Principle Made Noble… You actually become more discerning in how you’re going to look for pleasure. So much of what we do in our lives is driven by the desire for pleasure, and yet we very rarely sit down and think it through: what really is pleasant for us, what really does give satisfaction. You have to learn how to see the desire for pleasure as …
- Opening Your World… It starts with that question that the Buddha says lies at the beginning of discernment, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? Or what, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering?” You realize that your actions are the problem, and maybe you can change your actions. If you couldn’t change …
- The Right to Repair Your Mind… And as for the potentials for all the good things in the path, those require subtle discernment as well. Sometimes concentration starts out very, very small, and it doesn’t seem like much, and so you snuff it out. You want something better to come along. It’s as if every time a little seed begins to sprout, even though it is a seed …
- Guilt & Shame… Whereas if you don’t have an expansive mindset, haven’t developed the mind in virtue and discernment, and you haven’t learned how not to be overcome by pleasure or pain, then your mind is like a small cup of water. You throw that large crystal of salt in, and you can’t drink the water. It’s too salty. So regardless of …
- Streams of Anger… So, these are things you keep in mind to restrain yourself, but the actual solution is not in the mindfulness, it’s going to be in the discernment. One of the reasons we practice concentration is to get to know how the mind fabricates its experiences. We all know what the three fabrications are: The in-and-out breath is *bodily fabrication; *directed thought …
- Alone & Together… The details, the tiny workings out, may be different, which is why different people have different problems as they try to settle down into concentration, and why different issues will come up as you try to develop discernment. You read about other people’s approaches to getting past their defilements, and some of them may work for you and some of them may not …
- Off to a Good Start… So we focus on the breath as a way of training mindfulness, training alertness to give rise to concentration, discernment—and a lot of other good qualities as well. But it’s the mindfulness and the alertness that really get trained as our foundation. So you keep the breath in mind: all the way in, all the way out. You can focus on any …
- Cooking the Mind… That’s how your discernment grows. There was a Zen master, Dogen, who had an interesting point. He said that the development of the path is no different from the realization of cessation. That doesn’t mean that the path and the goal are the same thing. What it means is that the activity of developing the path, if you pay careful attention to …
- Learning Through Healing… So look at this as an opportunity both to heal the mind and to understand it; to soothe the mind and gain insight into it; to calm the mind and gain discernment. All at the same time.
- The Dhamma Bucket List… Generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill, equanimity: Which of these qualities is lacking in your mind? See if you can squeeze some of that out of your activities. And how would you go about developing those qualities? You can develop them in daily life. You can develop them by making up your mind you’re going to make a special donation …
- Thinking Your Way to Stillness… The questions are what change simple awareness into discernment: figuring out what’s a cause, what’s an effect; which causes are skillful, leading to good results and which causes are unskillful, leading to bad results. That set of questions should always be in the back of your mind. They’re the ones that will eventually lead you to see things in terms of …
- The Middle Way… qualities of what you do, what you say, how you think—or to look at it in another way, virtue, concentration, and discernment. What we’re working on right now is the concentration. How are you going to make your concentration part of the middle way? For one thing, you have to look at the other ways that your mind is tempted to deal …
- The Power of Perception… Your concentration practice begins to contain within it a lot of the lessons you’re going to need for discernment. So try to be very conscious of the process of perception. What perceptions are you holding in mind right now? And what are they doing, in terms of the breath, in terms of feelings? Do you like what they’re doing, or are you …
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