Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Guardian Meditations… If your mind is like that, it needs what Ajaan MahaBoowa calls discernment fostering concentration. You have to think your way to stillness, think your way to a place in the mind where the mind is willing to stop its thinking and settle down. There are lots of different lists of topics in the commentaries—40 different meditation topics in all. And there’s …
- Inner Voice Lessons… That’s why the Buddha said that concentration and discernment go together. You can’t do just insight practice or just concentration practice. The two of them go hand in hand. And it’s right here at this issue — these mental voices and how skillful you are in relating to them — that’s where the real meat of the practice lies.
- Intelligent Respect… It could also mean discernment. So I thought of the various ways in which Ajaan Fuang used the word, and the more I listened, the more I noticed that that was the actual meaning. So, I learned. When we come to the Dhamma, we have to remember that we come from a different culture with a different way of training. We feel that we …
- Calm in the Storm… As the Buddha said, that’s the essence of discernment: seeing things as separate. The thoughts that come into your mind are separate from you. The feelings in the body are separate from you. Pains in the body are separate from the body itself. You can separate things out like this. That puts you in a different position, a position where you’re not …
- The Buddha’s Buffet… You develop your discernment. The Buddha calls this penetrative insight into arising and passing away, conducive to the end of suffering. Even though you’re delaying the time when you’re going to finally go for the ultimate goal, you do need to have some insight into what you’re doing that’s causing suffering, and what you can do to stop. That’s …
- Nobility Is the Best Policy … He’d say, “What kind of meditator are you? Use your discernment to deal with the pain, to deal with the suffering.” But if there was medicine and the monk refused to take it, Ajaan Mun would scold him, too: “Why are you making yourself difficult to look after?” It sounds like you’d get scolded either way, but the lesson, of course, is …
- Ways to Think… The practice of concentration and developing concentration, developing discernment: These are precisely the skills you’re going to need as death occurs. So remind yourself that no matter what happens in life, no matter how bad things get, there’s always a skillful response—and that you benefit and the people around you benefit as you try to find that response and act on …
- Shaping Your Breath, Shaping Your Life… As the Buddha says, you train it in discernment, you train it in virtue, you train it in the unlimited (by which it means unlimited goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity), and you train it so that it’s not easily overcome by pleasure or pain. With that state of mind, any past bad karma, when it yields its results, is barely going to …
- Rites of Passage… You’ve got mindfulness reminding you to stay right here, alertness keeping watch over what’s going on, and discernment absorbed in trying to understand it. That’s a much deeper and more satisfying sense of seclusion. Ultimately, it forms the basis for the third one, seclusion from craving. As the Buddha said, craving is our constant companion even when the mind is in …
- Creativity & Play… If it’s not working, what can you do to adjust it so it does? The curious, inquisitive side of your mind is what’s going to lead to discernment. The people who aren’t inquisitive are the ones who get stuck in concentration and don’t want to move. Or they blindly want to follow a method where everything is spelled out for …
- Perfection in an Imperfect World… What are you doing? What’s coming about as a result? Ardency is the discernment factor among these three: realizing after all your actions will make a difference, so do your best to act in ways that are really skillful. That’s wise. So those are qualities the Buddha developed as well. Then there’s resolution, making up your mind you’re going to …
- Ingenuity… How can you use your discernment to figure out where is the awareness and where is the pain and in what way the awareness is separate from the pain, so that you don’t have to be weighed down by the suffering that the mind adds to the pain? This is why the teachings on the four elements or the four properties are very …
- The Breath All the Way… That’s the tranquility that follows on discernment and releases you from passion. Dispassion comes in its place, and when the dispassion comes, fabrications begin to stop—because what keeps them going is your passion. When there’s no passion, fabrications all cease. So you watch them ceasing, ceasing, ceasing, because of dispassion. That’s the third step in the last set of four …
- Maybe the Buddha Knew Something… As the Buddha said, a basic principle of wisdom or discernment is that if you know something you like to do will lead to long-term harm, you know how to talk to yourself in a way that makes you want to stop doing it. If there’s something you don’t like to do that you know will lead to long-term well …
- Trading Up… happiness. And the search for happiness basically means making a trade; there are some things you’ve got to give up in order to gain things that are of more value. Discernment lies in figuring out which are the things of more value. This principle of trade-off is something we’re doing all of the time. The question is simply, “Are the trades …
- Dharma Medicine… That’s what discernment is. It’s learning, one, how to divide things up and two, to see what happens when you do. That way, you can see which form of perception is really helpful right now, why it’s timely to apply it, because even though the three perceptions are, as the Buddha said, always true, there are times when they’re not …
- An Auspicious Day… It helps keep you ardent, and ardency is the expression of discernment in these three qualities. You can be mindful of all kinds of things, alert about all kinds of things, but if you’re not ardent about doing something about them, you’re not really wise. You may have all kinds of knowledge stored away, but if you don’t have that sense …
- Dhamma Medicine… The ones that are really a measure of your wisdom, your discernment, are the ones you like to do but they give bad results, and the ones you don’t like to do but give good results. In the first case—the things you like to do but give bad results—wisdom lies in learning how to talk yourself out of doing those things …
- Why Train the Mind… You need discernment to figure out what’s skillful and what’s not, what’s a cause and what’s an effect. You learn these skills in a rudimentary way as you work with the breath, and then you can start applying them to subtler things that are going on in the mind. That’s when you really find that there’s a potential …
- Three Levels of Evaluation… how you can maximize them so that the mind can stay still and balanced for a long period of time, how to keep the mind clear so that you can get the higher benefits of concentration, i.e., the discernment that can come when things are very clear in the mind, with a strong foundation of mindfulness and alertness. It’s a lot easier …
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