Search results for: "Discernment"
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- The Skill of Letting Go… So even just getting into concentration requires that you see drawbacks, and you ask yourself, of course, the opposite question: “Where’s the allure?” In this way, you get practice in letting go through discernment, through understanding, realizing the amount of effort that you put into manufacturing your experience, and getting a sense that a lot of things you manufacture are simply not worth …
- Motivation… And there is a “just letting it happen” aspect to it, but Ananda wouldn’t have gotten to that point if it hadn’t been for the desire, hadn’t been for the persistence and intent and powers of discrimination and discernment that he brought to the practice. If it hadn’t been for them, he wouldn’t have got to that point of …
- A Healthy Attitude Toward Happiness… Blind spots don’t help with the arising of discernment and they don’t help with learning how to see what you’re doing wrong and how you can correct it. So try to develop a healthy attitude toward happiness, a healthy attitude toward a sense of well-being right here. It’s not that hard to develop. Learn how to breathe in a …
- Thoughts About Thinking… Your discernment is going to require perceptions and thought-fabrications. So if you come across a perception, how do you know whether it’s part of the problem or part of the solution? You ask some questions. You look at its behavior. This is an aspect of the Buddha’s teachings that’s really distinctive: looking at the behavior of those activities in the …
- Pissing on Palaces… You have to train these qualities with discernment so that they don’t provide cover for your defilements. This means that, primarily, you have to tune into heedfulness, the sense that your actions really are life-shaping and you’ve got to be careful how you act. You can’t allow yourself to waste your time over things that are really no use at …
- Square One… This is where discernment enters into the meditation. As the Buddha said, you need both tranquility and insight to get the mind into concentration. To get the mind into concentration, you’ve got to choose one topic. Clear away all other topics in the mind. They may keep coming in, but just don’t pay attention to them. And you try to be ardent …
- Step Back & Watch… I wanted ill will.” And you’ve got to have the mindfulness and concentration and discernment to resist that, pull out of it, question it. When you’ve learned how to depend on your concentration, then you have to learn that there are some subtle things here in the concentration that you’ve got to question as well. So this ability to place a …
- Mastery… It is, as the Buddha says, the discernment that comes from developing, from meditation. You may know on one level that craving causes suffering, you may have seen it actually happening now and then. But you don’t really know craving until you’ve totally abandoned it. The same with the path: You may have found that moments of concentration, or even longer periods …
- A Pleasure Without Stories… We have to be open about the fact that we’re here for a sense of gratifying pleasure, but we want to use more discernment in how we look for our pleasure, our happiness, our sense of well-being. The Buddha, after all those of years of self torment, after realizing that self torment was not the way—he had been running away from …
- Right View Comes First… But with the right view, we’re borrowing the Buddha’s wisdom, we’re borrowing his discernment. And he’s freely given it to us. So try to make good use of it, because it’s the only way out.
- High-Level Dhamma… The potential for virtue, the potential for concentration, the potential for discernment are all there. But it’s not the case that you go straight to those things without having to muck around with your defilements, because the defilements are going to get in the way one way or another. Because our habit is to deal unskillfully with whatever comes up, then when the …
- The Truth of Transcendence… She cited a text in the Canon where the Buddha starts out with dependent co-arising up through suffering and then from suffering talks about how suffering gives rise to conviction and conviction gives rise to effort and joy, concentration, discernment, all the way up to release. So her conclusion was that release, too, is caused; therefore, she said, nibbana is also a conditioned …
- Recollection of the Buddha… an admirable friend, a person of conviction, generosity, virtue, and discernment. That’s the kind of friend we want to develop outside, and the kind of friend we want to develop inside, too, so that we can be our own best friend. As we sit here and meditate, we can make it a pleasant pastime—doing it every now and then—or we can …
- Heedful, Ardent, & Resolute… The results are going to take time because the process of developing your discernment requires that you watch your actions again and again and again to start noticing things you didn’t notice before. Your ability to see what’s skillful and what’s not will depend on your powers of concentration. The concentration sustains you in the effort of resolution and heedfulness and …
- The Practice of Right View… The only stress still in the mind is the stress of the path, because there’s a subtle level of stress that keeps concentration going, that keeps discernment active. In other words, even the path is stress, the cause of stress, and so at that point you let go of it. As for the cessation of stress, there are passages in the Canon describing …
- Life Well Lived… virtue, concentration, discernment. Qualities we can develop in ourselves. One of the hardest ones is concentration, because it’s so easy for the mind to wander off. Catching the mind is like trying to catch a bead of mercury: You put a little pressure on it, it scoots off; put a little pressure on this side, it scoots someplace else, scatters all over the …
- To Stay the Course… It’s a great lesson in discernment that the things that weigh the mind down come from the mind itself. It may use things from outside to weigh itself down, but the act of weighing itself down—it does that to itself. So equanimity teaches you not to do that. There are things out there that can get you really discouraged. And there are …
- Unskillful Thinking… If you learn how to develop your mindfulness, alertness, and discernment, you build up your resistance, so that when a sight comes into the eyes, you can see it for what it is. It’s just a very ephemeral kind of thing. It’s there for just an instant and then it’s gone, and then it’s replaced by another one, and another …
- Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge… So as you’re sitting here, doing battle with whatever thoughts in the mind want to pull you away from concentration or to get in the way of your discernment, it’s good to think of some basic warrior principles. The first one is: Choose your battles. You can’t take on every battle or issue that comes your way, otherwise you’ll lose …
- Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses… I think I’ve said other times that of the four brahmaviharas, equanimity is one that requires some discernment, so you can figure out, “What things are beyond my control? There are people I’d like to see happy, but they’re not going to be happy.” This gets into another perception that the Buddha taught Rahula, which is the perception of not-self …
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