Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Customs of the Noble Ones… As for qualities of the mind that need to be developed—mindfulness, alertness, concentration, discernment—you try to be up for the challenge. That’s how you maintain the customs of the noble ones so that you can become a noble one as well. That’s what this is all about. All the noble ones of the past: They didn’t start out as …
- Free Not to Suffer… In Ajaan’s Lee’s explanation of the three qualities, ardency is the quality that embodies wisdom and discernment. In other words, you could remember all kinds of things about what the Buddha taught, and you could be watching yourself do all kinds of things in the present moment, and it would count as mindfulness and alertness. But if you’re not ardent in …
- Friends with The Breath… This refers to the brahmaviharas, but also to training in virtue, training in discernment, training so that your mind isn’t overcome by pleasure or overcome by pain. These are all things we can do right now so that the salt of our past bad actions gets dissolved away. And the goodness of our current actions is like that broad river. So pay attention …
- Wake Up from Addiction… And it’s important to notice that this is one of the lists of qualities in which your discernment does some work before you settle in. In other words, you’re not just using brute force to get the mind to settle down, and it’s not the case that it naturally settles down on its own. You find that you’ve got to …
- Outside of the Box… Your mindfulness, your alertness, your concentration, your discernment, have all gotten dull. That means you’ve got to sharpen them. So you put the problem aside for the time being and say, “I’ll get back to that when my tools are sharper.” So either way, whether your entanglements are dream problems or real problems, you have ways of thinking yourself out of the …
- The Raft of Concepts… That’s how discernment is developed. You’re not going to maintain this kind of focus unless you have a real appreciation that, yes, your actions really are important in this issue of creating suffering — not only now but on into the future. This is how the proper use of concepts gives focus to your meditation. A while back, I was giving a talk …
- The World Is Swept Away… But to develop discernment, he says, you take that desire for happiness and adjust it a bit: “What could we do to give rise to true happiness, long-lasting happiness, a happiness that wouldn’t change?” In this way you take your desire, you take the possibility of change, and you turn it into a path that leads beyond, that finally does lead to …
- The Uses of Right Concentration… And you should try to notice that feeling of delight, because it’s going to play an important role later when you use concentration to develop discernment. In the meantime, you use the delight to get good at your concentration. As Ajaan Fuang used to say, you have to be really crazy about the meditation in order to do it well. You have to …
- Feeding on Right Resolve… Here it’s interesting to note that when Ajaan Lee’s talks about the factors of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency in his discussion of right mindfulness, he points out that ardency—the persistence—is the factor of discernment and wisdom. It’s the same when you understand the four noble truths: The wisdom lies in seeing what should be done with those four noble …
- Why We Meditate… goodwill, compassion, concentration, discernment. We all have these qualities to some extent, it’s simply a question of learning how to develop them. If you really develop them, you find that you’ve got all the potentials you need for true happiness right here in the mind. Once you can tap into that inner source of happiness, then you can live in the world …
- But Not Sick in Mind… In fact, it’s in the course of figuring things out, how to do things, how to get the mind down, that you gain a lot of your discernment. This leads directly to the other two bases of power. One is intentness, that you give it your full intention and your full attention. As the Thais say, you put your heart into it. When …
- Factors for Awakening… When you’re heedful like this, the other factors for awakening come in, the factors that show how mindfulness and discernment—the first two factors—lead to concentration. There’s the rapture that comes as the mind gets more and more full, as your sense of the breath energy gets more and more full. You’re not wounding it with unskillful thoughts, unskillful attitudes …
- Stern Kindness… virtue, concentration, and discernment; or the noble eightfold path; or the different variations that we find in the Wings to Awakening. Anyone who’s going to gain awakening will have to do it this way. But he doesn’t know how many people are going to do it. There’s no guarantee that we’re all going to get there, but the Buddha does …
- The Language of the Heart (1)… uses the analogy of a warrior going into battle. He describes how the different aspects of the practice can correspond to the food for the warrior and the warrior’s weapon. Discernment, he said, is the weapon. As I was reading the passage for the first time, I kept thinking, “Well, who’s the warrior?” And he finally got to the conclusion: The warrior …
- Dedicating Goodness, Spreading Goodwill… You can see this in the question that the Buddha says lies at the beginning of wisdom and discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What’s skillful? What’s blameless?” The wisdom there lies in seeing, one, that long-term happiness is possible, and two, that long-term is better than short-term, and three …
- How Much Concentration Is Enough?… because you’ve got to get your powers of discernment more and more subtle. That comes from getting better and better at the concentration. So the question as to how much concentration is enough: The only way you can answer that is by developing as much concentration as you can and learning how to observe it and use it properly. There’s no one …
- Three Levels of Effort… Your powers of mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment: They all grow. Ultimately, this brings the mind to a point—what we might call the third level of skillful effort—where there’s really nothing more to do. If skillful qualities are developed, there’s a great sense of balance in the mind—stability. There’s a strong sense of well-being. This is not …
- Questioning the Hindrances… So what we’re doing here requires both tranquility to get everything calmed down enough so you can actually watch for a while, and the questioning of insight that leads to true discernment, that’s not willing to take everything for granted, that’s willing to look into all the “of-courses” in the mind. “Of course, the mind has to worry! Of course …
- Meditation Prep… That’s how you develop your discernment. You see cause and effect, skillful and unskillful, i.e., the four noble truths. You develop the path, so you can comprehend suffering and eventually let go of its cause. That’s how you realize the end of suffering: by experimenting, by exploring, by bringing the right attitudes and the right mental qualities to whichever meditation technique …
- Guarding Against Trouble… Why don’t you have discernment doing the looking? Why don’t you have goodwill doing the looking? Equanimity doing the looking? After all, the reason why you’re looking will also stir up results, and you don’t want to stir up results that go to more greed, more aversion, more delusion. So you look carefully at how you’re using your senses …
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