Search results for: "Discernment"
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- The Body Doesn’t Care… This is precisely why the path is effective because it’s basically factors of letting go together with factors that develop qualities of alertness, awareness, concentration, and discernment so that you can really see and appreciate what’s happening—to verify for yourself what’s happening as you let go. It’s not simply letting go, letting go, and that’s going to be …
- Choiceful Awareness… We’ve heard about all the wonderful things that happen when you gain discernment and insight arises, and so we want to be right there, right now, without building the foundation, without mastering the skills that are needed for that insight really to have an impact on the mind, to have the really desired effect—which is to train the mind not to create …
- Admirable in the Beginning, Middle, & End… There’s virtue, there’s concentration, and there’s discernment, all of which are good things to develop. That’s the beginning, just learning about the theory. Then there’s the actual practice, and that’s admirable too. As you put these principles into practice, you learn a lot about yourself. You change your environment and you find that you have potentials within yourself …
- The Wear & Tear of Life… And the Buddha said, “Well, when Sariputta died, did he take virtue away with him? Did he take concentration away with him? Discernment? Release?” All the really valuable things in the world are still here. That’s what you’ve got to remember. Regardless of aging, illness, death, and separation, the good things in life are still available, if you take advantage of them …
- Think Calmly about Death… The right attitude basically comes from developing virtue, concentration, and discernment—and particularly concentration around the brahmaviharas, the sublime attitudes. Learn how to make your mind spacious. Have goodwill for all beings. There was the time when the Buddha had a wound in his foot. Devadatta had tried to kill him by rolling a rock off of a mountain, and a long splinter of …
- Over the Pass… It’s interesting that in the three main divisions of the path—virtue, concentration, and discernment—everything under virtue is about abstaining. And yet, the path requires that you develop certain qualities of mind that we would call virtues in English: things like integrity, heedfulness, honesty. The Buddha says those are prerequisites for the path. So they’re there, it’s simply that they …
- Lessons in Happiness… You discern when it’s coming in long, know when it’s going out long, coming in short, going out short. You sensitize yourself to the varieties of the breath, and the longness and shortness of the breath. But that’s only one facet of the varieties you’ll find. There’s also deep breathing, shallow breathing, fast, slow, broad, narrow, heavy breathing, light …
- Get Real… That act of adjusting is the beginning of discernment. You begin to see connections: cause and effect. When you choose to breathe in a certain way, certain sensations are going to result, either pleasurable or painful. That’s the law of karma right there: seeing how things arise and pass away, seeing the connections between what you do and the feelings that arise and …
- The Truth of Perceptions… s nothing true to them.” That’s not the case. There are perceptions that are accurate, there are perceptions that are useful, and they play a huge role in the path. Discernment is made out of perceptions. It’s one of the reasons why we have to practice it. But at the same time, someday we’re going to put it aside, because we …
- Hindrances… That, of course, requires mindfulness, alertness, ardency, discernment, concentration: the qualities you develop as you meditate. So when you meditate and focus on the breath, it’s not as if you’re running away from potential future dangers. You’re actually preparing for them. As for doubt—doubt about yourself, doubt about the Dhamma—the best way to deal with that is to test …
- Healing Awareness… You bring your awareness, alertness, your mindfulness, your ardency, your discernment—all of these qualities get brought together in the quality of this awareness that you can then apply to other areas outside where you used to create issues and problems, but now you can approach them in a new way. You can solve the problems by the way you relate to things. So …
- The Dhamma Mirror… You discern short breathing, long breathing, you train yourself to breathe sensitive to the entire body, and then you calm bodily fabrication. Now, “bodily fabrication” there means the in-and-out breath. The question is: Why does he use a technical term when he could simply say, “Calm the in-and-out breath”? The reason is because he wants you to see the extent …
- Listening to the Body… If that’s all you had to do, what kind of breath would really feel good there? And once you’ve had one good in-and-out breath, how about trying another one? As for concentration and discernment, all those other things you might be aiming at, leave them alone for a while. Just focus on the breath. After you’ve been with the …
- Take Heart… conviction, virtue, generosity, learning, discernment. You have those to at least some extent, so nurture them, work with them, find happiness in them. Because that’s part of the practice, too. There’s been this tendency in the last century or two to divide meditation from the rest of the practice, making it totally an affair of the head: figuring things out, gaining insights …
- Potentials Past & Present… There’s a dimension that the mind can touch if you develop all the right qualities in mind—in particular, mindfulness, concentration, discernment: what we’re trying to develop right now. You get very clear about what’s going on in the mind, how the mind takes raw material from the past and can fashion it either in a skillful way or in an …
- Respect Opens Possibilities… virtue, concentration, and discernment. The Buddha is asking you to apply the framework of these four noble truths to your problem of suffering. Again, it’s not simply a matter of assent, saying, “Yes, this must be true” or “I agree with what he has to say.” Each of these truths involves a duty, and it’s in performing these duties that you gain …
- How to Listen… All you need is discernment. All you need is wisdom, insight. You can go straight from mindfulness to insight.” But the Buddha’s instructions for mindfulness, basically, are instructions on how to get the mind to settle down into oneness. So you’re listening to the talk and you can bring your mind to the oneness of stillness. That’s an important factor in …
- Voices in the Mind… That’s why, when the Buddha’s talking about ways of dealing with distractions, the ultimate one—where you can’t extract your way from a particular distraction through discernment, so you just force yourself out of it—gets very physical: Place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth and clench your teeth. Re-establish the physicality of your present …
- Fighting Spirit… How long could I sit here without moving, and without suffering from it?” If you just sit there without trying to develop any discernment, it doesn’t really accomplish much aside from, on the one hand, developing more patience, but also developing some either skillful or unskillful qualities that nourish or hinder that patience. You have to be on the lookout for that. But …
- Start Out Small… that whatever’s happening in the universe, the basic pattern is something you can discern right here in the present moment. In chaos theory they call this “scale invariance”: the patterns on the large scale, on the macro scale, are the same things happening on the micro scale. And you’ve got the micro scale right here. On the macro scale you see that …
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