Search results for: "Wisdom"

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  2. Emulating the Truth
     … This is how we also develop the wisdom faculty in the factors of awakening, the factor that’s called analysis of qualities, dhamma-vicaya: looking at what’s skillful in our actions, and what’s not skillful, and seeing that they’re clearing different. It’s important to realize that we overcome doubt not simply by forcing ourselves to believe something, but by looking … 
  3. The Buddha’s Cure
     … That requires discernment, wisdom. The Buddha says discernment begins with the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” You want to use that as a standard for judging all the different desires and emotions that come up. If you go with this desire, this emotion, or do what it’s telling you to do, will that … 
  4. Skillful Thinking
     … Those are the ones that test your wisdom, your practical intelligence. Can you talk yourself into doing the things you don’t like to do but give good results? Can you talk yourself out of doing things that you like to do but give bad results? In other words, wisdom is strategic. The Buddha recommends that, to get started on that, you go ask … 
  5. Directing Yourself Rightly
     … But the concentration also has to be tempered with wisdom—discernment. Wisdom isn’t an automatic result of concentration. Just because the mind is focused doesn’t mean you’re going to see things clearly and rightly. You have to actively contemplate once the mind is still, because a mind that’s still can latch onto all kinds of things. The concentration can get … 
  6. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … Now, in the commentaries, they define alertness, sampajañña, more as clear comprehension, and for them that’s the wisdom quality among the three: comprehending things in terms of the three characteristics, comprehending them in context. The problem is, the commentary gets very snide about defining alertness as knowing what you’re doing, while you’re doing it—even though that’s clearly how the … 
  7. The Open Committee
     … That’s the beginning of wisdom. Then, two, you make a rule that when anything is proposed in the mind, you want to know what the consequences are going to be. Then you learn how to strengthen the committee members that are on your side. This is important. This is why we have this practice of concentration, so that we can take the observing … 
  8. The Ivory Intersection
     … One of the first steps in wisdom is realizing there’s a lot you don’t know. As the Buddha said, when you recognize you’re foolish about things, you’re at least to that extent wise. We’re here to overcome ignorance. If we don’t admit that we have ignorance, we’re not going to be able to overcome it. Ignorance isn … 
  9. Outside the Box
     … The skillful ones have some wisdom in them. There’s no such thing as just brute desire, without any ideas behind it. There’s always a view that directs your desire, a view of what’s worth doing, a view of what’s okay to do. Which means that right effort has to include a lot of discernment. The Buddha never taught mere brute … 
  10. Doubt vs. Discernment
     … The commentary, when explaining those three qualities, identifies sampajañña—which I translate as alertness—as the wisdom quality. It defines it as seeing things in terms of the three characteristics, which is why you often see sampajañña translated as “clear comprehension.” But the Canon doesn’t define alertness that way at all. It’s simply knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing … 
  11. A Room of Your Own
     … There is wisdom in not taking on everything all at once. Once you start feeling at ease and at home here, you can begin to bring up issues. Where is there still tension? Where is there still stress? Where is there still a sense of being burdened here in the mind? Then you can begin to see what you’re doing that’s adding … 
  12. The Joy of Renunciation
     … It requires some wisdom to see the value of wanting to cultivate it. But that’s why we turn to the Dhamma to begin with, to develop the wisdom that will set us free.
  13. Reliable Action
     … This is where the Buddha says you have to develop wisdom. When we think about Buddha’s wisdom, we tend to think in more abstract terms: the teachings on not-self, emptiness, or dependent co-arising. They seem very abstract but they grow out of this very issue: how you deal with the mind when you know an action is going to give bad … 
  14. People of Integrity
     … If you’re compassionate in this way, the Buddha says it’s also the beginning of wisdom, because wisdom starts with the desire to know what actions will lead to long-term welfare and happiness. In this way, these qualities of truthfulness and compassion come together to make you wise. So as you meditate, you have to remember: You’re not here just for … 
  15. Understanding Happiness
     … They miss this very basic essential question, the beginning of wisdom: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” When wisdom doesn’t get off on the right foot, it can easily go astray. So you look at your external actions, at your words, and at the movements of your mind—because you begin to understand that the … 
  16. The Wisdom of Merit
     … So even just the way he teaches the development of merit is teaching some of the important lessons about wisdom. And in the practice of generosity, he teaches us something that’s counterintuitive to us when we were little children—that by giving something away we’re going to be happy. But if we do it often enough, we begin to see that it … 
  17. Conviction & Truth
     … That’s an element of wisdom. I’ve talked in the past about how when Ajaan Lee described the qualities of the mind that you bring to mindfulness practice, for him the wisdom quality is ardency, which is pretty much the same thing as right effort combined with heedfulness. In other words, you put your whole heart into trying to bring into being the … 
  18. Succeeding at Happiness
     … In other words, you approach happiness as an exercise in wisdom. Think of the Buddha’s statement about how wisdom begins with finding a brahman or contemplative—in other words, somebody who has practiced the Dhamma—and asking that person, “What’s skillful? What’s blameless? What when I do will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The basic answer comes in … 
  19. No Happiness Other than Peace
     … There’s the wisdom that sees that long-term happiness is better than short-term, and that it has to depend on your actions. That’s why the question that lies at the beginning of wisdom or discernment is, “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The wisdom lies in the long-term, and it lies in … 
  20. Hypocrisy
     … People speak in terms of very high principles, very high bits of wisdom, yet when you look at their lives, they’re not in line with their wisdom, not in line with their ideals. It’s a major failing. So to avoid that failing, you want to look very carefully at what you do. This is why, when the Buddha formulated the customs of … 
  21. Sensitivity All the Time
     … So the insights you gain are not necessarily wise sayings that you can write down in little books of wisdom. Insight is a greater and greater sensitivity to what’s going on. Don’t think that you’d like to have things explained beforehand, or to sit here trying to come up with little rules or memory aids: “Well, when this happens, you should … 
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