Search results for: "Discernment"

  1. Page 86
  2. What to Tolerate, What Not
     … Reading books helps, but the real education comes from looking at what’s going on in the mind, developing the skills you need in terms of concentration, mindfulness, and discernment to see these things clearly. Because they can be undercut, they can be uprooted. That way, even though there may be stress in your experience, it doesn’t weigh on the mind. The stress … 
  3. In the Eyes of the Wise
     … You have to be more discerning: You should try to look good in the eyes of the wise. That’s how he has you use a sense of honor in the practice. That’s what honor means: having a sense of how you look in other people’s eyes, and wanting to look good. Now, honor’s gotten a bad name here in the … 
  4. Harmless & Clearheaded
     … You can listen to the Dhamma and hear all the wonderful things the Buddha has to say about goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, equanimity, concentration, discernment, and release. It’s good to hear about those things, because it opens our minds to possibilities that we might miss otherwise. It expands the range of our imagination. But simply hearing about them is not enough. As with … 
  5. Constructing & Deconstructing
     … When the Buddha talks about discernment being penetrative insight into arising and passing away, it’s not just passively watching things come and go. He says that this insight is penetrative, and when he talks about penetrative, it means seeing distinctions, and especially the distinction of what’s skillful, what’s not skillful: What has an effect on what. In other words, what’s … 
  6. A Good Place to Not-Self
     … So you can look at the competitions of life and decide, well, which ones do you really want to get involved with? What are the long-term consequences? When the Buddha says you develop insight and discernment in the meditation, it’s just that: You’re able to see long-term consequences and make your choices based on that long-term view. You’re … 
  7. Creating a New Self
     … Try to be more discerning, and you do that by holding on to yourself as a meditator. Having yourself as a meditator gives you a good safe haven to go—it’s your safe space. It’s also your safe space as you’re dealing with other people. Because remember that other people have lots of committee members as well. And you never know … 
  8. Breath Teaches the Bramaviharas
     … generosity, virtue, renunciation, discernment, persistence, endurance, truth, determination, goodwill and equanimity. You work on these, and you hope that their influence will spread out into the world. But you can’t determine how many people will benefit from it, just as the Buddha himself couldn’t determine how many people were going to follow his way to awakening. Your duty is to work on … 
  9. Mindfulness 2.0
     … And finally there’s the fourth base of power, vimamsa, which is another aspect of discernment. You try to use your ingenuity in figuring out ways that’ll help the mind to stay. This is what gets you absorbed, because you’re experimenting and you’re learning. You’re not just tying the mind down to a stake; you’re gaining some training in … 
  10. The Five Hindrances
     … Your discernment is strong. You can sit down to read the newspapers and have no idea what’s going on. As we’ve seen, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes. Most of the important stuff goes on behind the scenes. It comes out only when things begin to unravel. We have no idea how much more is still left behind … 
  11. Useful Thinking
     … Develop your discernment of what you’re going to do, what you’re not going to do, when you’re doing it well, when you’re not doing it well, because you’re doing, doing, doing all the time. Even when you’re sitting here and thinking you’re not doing anything at all, you’re playing that not-doing-anything-at-all role … 
  12. Establishing Priorities
     … As you’re sitting in meditation, as you go through life, your top priority should be to stay here with the breath so as to develop the powers of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment that will allow you to realize the end of suffering. A lot of the practice is learning how to stick to those priorities and not let other priorities sneak in.
  13. Disconnecting
     … If you don’t have a generous mind, you can’t get into right concentration—and forget about genuine discernment. So generosity is something that you can do well. This is how you create good interconnections. Instead of feeding and taking in, you’re giving, distributing out. It’s the opposite. The same with the precepts: There are some grubby ways you can feed … 
  14. Resources for Endurance
     … the strength, the fortitude, and the discernment that help us to see what we can draw on, what the positive potentials are within any situation, so that when you have to make a trade-off, you’re not constantly focused on the difficulties. If you focus on the difficulties, it just makes it harder and harder to deal with the situation. Focus instead on … 
  15. Concentration & Insight
     … It’s simply a matter of learning how to do it with wisdom and discernment. We all want to be happy, and you’d think that we’d act in ways that would create happiness, but look at our behavior: So many times we do things that lead to stress and suffering and harm, and yet we wonder, “Why?” Well, it’s because we … 
  16. Into the Cave with the Tiger
     … You want to develop the subtlety of your discernment. As the Buddha said, right here in the present moment is where you’re causing yourself suffering. You’re not causing yourself suffering in the past, you’re not causing it in the future. You’re causing it right now. There may be things coming in through the senses that come from past unskillful karma … 
  17. Introduction
     … This is why we spend so much time trying to develop mindfulness, alertness, and discernment in our practice, applying them to our actions, with the realization that our actions are the deciding factor. They make all the difference in the world between whether we’re going to be happy or are going to suffer, whether we’re going to cause happiness or suffering for … 
  18. More than a Sliver of Mindfulness
     … This is where discernment comes in, as you understand what’s skillful and what’s unskillful. And you gain experience in directing the mind where it should go. One area you keep it away from, of course, is thoughts of greed and distress with reference to the world. These are the thoughts that the kids in New York were having trouble with. They hadn … 
  19. The Wisdom of Tenacity
     … As the Buddha says, the strength of discernment is knowledge of arising and passing away—which we tend to equate with one of the more advanced stages of practice, but it doesn’t have to be. You see an impulse arise, you see an impulse pass away, that’s it. And whether there’s a need lurking behind it or not, don’t ask … 
  20. Between Either & Or
     … What’s the mind doing around the pain? Sometimes you’ll gain this understanding with subtle pains, and sometimes it requires more extreme ones, when the mind is cornered and can’t find any other way out aside from sharpening its discernment into what your perceptions are doing to build a bridge from the pain into the mind. So instead of having you pursue … 
  21. Sensitive to the Breath
     … This is one of the ways you develop your discernment, by noticing, when something is not working, what you could do to change. And open your mind to larger possibilities of what you could possibly do to change things. This is how the Buddha gained awakening himself. There was nobody there to teach him. He had no meditation guides to consult. How did he … 
  22. Load next page...