Search results for: "Discernment"
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- 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 …
- The Endurance of a Long-distance Runner… So the kind of endurance you’re developing here is based on discernment. You don’t just put up with these things. You watch them for a while—you have to endure them sometimes for the sake of seeing through them—but you don’t just sit there and accept the situation and take it, take it, take it. As for the things the …
- 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 …
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