Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Sensitive to the Mind… He has you think about, “Okay, what do I need to prepare? I need to develop more mindfulness, more alertness, more discernment.” Where are you going to find those qualities? By being with the breath. This way you lasso the mind in. You want to get it so that it’s willing to settle down. Other times, it needs something more positive to get …
- Clinging & Its Cure… It comes down, of course, to the precepts, the practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment. You take on the Buddha’s shoulds because they’re good for you. He formulated them not because he wanted to impose his will on other people or just because he liked rules. He formulated them because this is what works. You act on skillful intentions, the results are …
- The Karma Snake… your practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment for the sake of putting an end to suffering. If you use the teachings for other reasons, trying to assign blame, say, outside, or deciding that there are certain people you’re not going to help because they’ve obviously got bad karma, that’s an abuse of the teaching. Or if you’re going to justify …
- Know the Dhamma by Its Results… This means that you have to be discerning as to which desires to cultivate, which ones to nurture, and which ones you’ve got to cut off. And your willingness to put effort in here is crucial. If you get lazy around this issue, then you’ve wandered off. And finally there’s shedding, as the Buddha calls it, basically shedding pride, shedding your …
- Over-informed… We learn a lot of good lessons that way, unexpected lessons, because a lot of discernment is unexpected. We can read the books, we can think about them. If we get good books, and our thinking is right, it can point us in the right direction, but it can’t answer all the questions. And no matter how right your right views may have …
- Physical Pains & Painful Words… You’ll find that in exercising your discernment in this way, exercising your ingenuity in this way, the Dhamma becomes yours. It’s not something imposed by some outside authority or from some strange culture someplace else. It becomes a body of principles by which you manage your own mind, manage your own life in a way that gives rise to a happiness that …
- The Adventure in the Present… As you develop your powers of discernment and sensitivity through repeated action, repeated reflection, repeated observation, your sensitivity finally reaches a point where it really does open up suddenly to something deathless, something other. So it’s not a distraction to keep focusing on what you’re doing and the results of what you’re doing. Many of us don’t like looking at …
- The Buddha’s Safe Space… So the different aspects of the path—virtue, concentration, and discernment—all help one another along. And they all provide you a safe space: a physical safe space inside the body where you can have a sense of ease; a mental safe space inside the mind where, whatever thoughts come up will come up in the arena of your understanding of kamma: your understanding …
- A Mind like Wind… It becomes purified in concentration, steadied so that your discernment can start doing its work; figuring out where there are still Velcro hooks on your mind and how you can shave them off, not getting snagged and sucked into the story lines that make you suffer. So, learn to see the body, your experience of the body, largely as breath. Then make your mind …
- A Total Training… It’s a common fault as meditators that we want to go really quickly to the discernment before we’ve developed the foundation for it. As Ajaan Fuang once said, it’s like building a many-storey building. If the foundation is poor, then even just one storey is going to collapse. But if the foundation is solid, you can build as many storeys …
- Loss… And the Buddha said, “Well, did Sariputta take virtue away with him? Did he take concentration away? Did he take discernment away? Did he take release away?” No, all the important things in life were still there. The important possibilities, the important opportunities were still there. And the Buddha continued, “Did I ever tell you that anything born will never leave you? Things that …
- Don’t Focus on Jhana, Focus on the Breath… Or you could try to figure out, “How can I stay here with less effort, with less input, but still get the same results?” That’s a question of discernment. And you take that quality of evaluation and then you apply it to making your concentration more and more settled. When you get it really well settled, you stop asking those questions for a …
- Perceptions & Potentials… After all, what is wisdom and discernment? It’s seeing your own stupidity—areas where you’ve been foolish. You have to be in a good mood to be willing to see those things. So, let the breath put you in the right mood. Let your perceptions of the breath put you in the right mood. Remember the task of mindfulness: It’s not …
- Metacognition… When the Buddha gives his examples for the kind of discernment that develops out of concentration, he says that first you’ve got to get really good at the concentration. So let the mind mature. Then, when it’s mature, you can observe it. Here again, metacognition: You step back a bit and you notice how the concentration is fabricated, how it’s composed …
- Mature Happiness… virtue, concentration, discernment. They’re noble qualities of mind. And the happiness we’re looking for is a happiness that’s mature. It requires mature wisdom to attain it. As the Buddha said, wisdom starts with the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to long-term welfare and happiness?” The wisdom there is, one, seeing that it’s up to your actions …
- Developing the Path… For discernment to become a faculty—in other words, a dominant factor in your mind—you have to actually develop conviction, persistence—which includes developing virtue—and then mindfulness and concentration. In other words, all the factors of the path have to be developed for right view to really become strong, to have a good solid foundation. Not only do you have to do …
- Skills for Dying Well… And that’s going to depend on your skill, the effort you put in, the discernment you put in, all the good qualities that are needed: mindfulness, concentration, conviction, all the other strengths that the Buddha teaches. You want to develop those strengths and you want to see that it’s worthwhile to do so. If you believe that death is the end, then …
- In Earnest… The five strengths—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—are healthy food for the mind, food that teaches it to be more and more independent, less and less reliant on its old kinds of feeding, its old kinds of food. When you think of the image of feeding—that it’s not just you gobbling down stuff but you’re also on fire—it makes …
- Anchored by Skillful Roots… When you’ve got a taproot that goes way down into the mind—in terms of concentration, in terms of discernment—you find a source inside that’s nourishing. That’s the source that can feed your need for happiness so that it doesn’t have to depend on anything else. In other words, your goodness doesn’t have to depend on outside conditions …
- Unentangled Compassion… find it easier and easier to maintain your mindfulness and alertness because it gets more interesting. It seems more rewarding. And almost without thinking about it, you find yourself developing concentration. Discernment comes with figuring out what’s the appropriate effort to apply in any one particular situation. What do you need right now for the mind to be willing to settle down? And …
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