Search results for: "Discernment"
- Page 92
- Guardian Meditations… What you’re going to need at those points in life will be more mindfulness, more alertness, more discernment. Where are you going to get those things? From meditating. When you can think in these ways, it’s a lot easier to get back to the breath. You’re not just suppressing the thoughts that are irritating you, you’re actually investigating them for …
- Feeding Frenzy: Dependent Co-arising… When you learn to feed here, you really develop the various strengths of the mind—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment—that can strengthen it to the point where ultimately it doesn’t need to feed anymore. That’s a great gift right there, both to yourself and to everyone around you.
- Experimental Intelligence… Of course this means we have to be very careful in how we conduct our tests, which again is why we work at developing concentration, developing mindfulness, all the mental attributes of patience, endurance, alertness, honesty, and discernment. They put us in a position where we can test things and evaluate the results reliably, so that we’re not overcome by bias and we …
- Right View Tells You What to Do… So this is how getting the mind into concentration helps with your discernment. Again, it’s an issue of watching what you’re doing and figuring out what would be a better way to act. That’s all under the purview of right view. Now ultimately this sensitivity to your actions takes you to a place where there’s nothing doing in the mind …
- The Choice Not to Suffer… But the Buddha says that as you straighten out those issues, you can dig deeper into the underlying issue: “Why is there suffering? What can be done about it?” And you’ll find that if you keep pursuing this issue with your discernment, it takes you really far.
- Anupassana… This is why concentration and discernment have to go together. Be very still to watch when the mind goes for something: Why does it go? What does it think it’s getting out of it? The reasons are going to differ from person to person. This is why the Buddha didn’t teach a technique for vipassana. Instead, he recommended asking questions, like, “To …
- The Role of Attachment… You have to learn how to watch and evaluate on your own; otherwise, you simply believe what the teacher tells you and you don’t get to exercise your own judgment, which is where the discernment comes from: in exercising your own judgment, getting a sense of what’s better. What is deeper? What is more refined? What kind of pleasure is more stable …
- Breath Meditation: The Fourth Tetrad… What you do know is that you’re going to need lots of mindfulness, lots of alertness, lots of concentration, lots of discernment, whatever happens. And where are you going to get those qualities? By developing the mind right now. So, to take care of any eventuality in the future, you’re working on your meditation. That’s your best way of preparing for …
- Respect… But here you’re developing kindness, compassion, mindfulness, discernment, alertness, persistence, reliability: all good qualities, qualities that feel good in and of themselves and are conducive to true happiness. So it’s not only a good goal, but it’s also a good path. And you develop a greater sense of self-esteem, self-worth as you follow the path. That’s the beginning …
- Be Bigger Than Your Pains… developing those skills—the mindfulness, the concentration, and the discernment. This larger state of mind allows you to be bigger than your sufferings, bigger than your pains, so try to keep this enlarged perspective in mind. One of the Buddha’s terms for the mind in concentration is mahaggatam cittam, the expanded mind or the enlarged mind. You can see things from a larger …
- Imagine… And for discernment to do its work of insight in the present moment, the heart of the path has to stay healthy and strong. You have to create and maintain a good solid basis through concentration. So because it’s a created state, you have to be creative about it, imaginative about it. And you find that the more your imagination opens up to …
- The Mind’s Eating Disorders… Make it persistent, be mindful, develop concentration so that you can develop the discernment that sees these things clearly. This is how you strengthen the mind to the point where it finds something inside that doesn’t need to feed, and that’s when all your eating disorders, subtle and obvious, will end.
- Training Your Minds… We try to develop our mindfulness, our alertness, concentration, discernment, our sensitivity as to what’s really going on in the mind, so that we can train all of the members of the committee to see where true happiness lies, and what we can do to gain it. Because this is one thing that all the members of the committees have in common: They …
- The Dhamma Wheel… And you do that by following the path, which comes down to virtue, concentration, and discernment, like we’re doing right now. In terms of the duties, you want to comprehend the suffering so that you can abandon the cause. You try to realize the cessation of suffering by developing the path. The factors of the path start with right view about these four …
- Hold on to Your Frame of Reference… Remind yourself that you don’t really know what’s going to happen in the future, how much longer you’re going to live, what you’re going to face, but you do know that the more mindfulness you have, the more alertness you have, the more concentration and discernment, the better the position you’ll be in handling whatever comes up. So meditating …
- Thinking Seriously about Happiness… You can develop your concentration, develop your discernment. At the very least, you can spread thoughts of goodwill. Goodwill is a wish for happiness. The Buddha calls it “a monk’s wealth.” In other words, when you become a monk, everything you have is somebody else’s gift. If you’ve been a monk for a couple years, every cell in your body is …
- Open Are the Doors to the Deathless… This is one of the reasons why we need concentration to pull away from our ordinary ways of feeding, and why we need discernment that provides us with the perceptions that allow us to step back even further. So, you want to see the drawbacks of these things you’re feeding on. You want to see the drawbacks of the act of feeding itself …
- Mindfulness the Gatekeeper… You don’t just say, “Well, that’s the nature of concentration, the nature of things, to arise and pass away,” thinking that that’s discernment. Actually, it’s simply not doing your duty. Your duty is to try to figure out how to get that concentration back. Try to remember what gave rise to it to begin with and recreate those causes again …
- The Best News in the World… Some of the factors are factors of virtue, some are factors of concentration, some are factors of discernment. As we practice these things, they lead to release. So the Buddha would tell the story of his quest for awakening and what he learned on the night of his awakening. As he said, there were many more things he learned on the night of his …
- Looking after Yourself with Ease… You’ve got the well-plastered wall, which is your discernment. And you’ve got a storehouse full of food, which is your concentration. If you can give yourself a sense of wellbeing simply by the way you breathe, by the way you settle your mind inside, then you find you’ve got something you can tap into anytime of the day, in any …
- Load next page...
