Search results for: "Discernment"
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- Harmony Inside & Outside… Generosity, virtue, meditation, or in other terms, virtue, concentration and discernment—all the things that develop good qualities in the mind: That was considered practice, whereas in the Anglo center, it was just sitting and walking mindfully. That was it. The author recounts how one night she was talking to one of the members of the Anglo center, and it suddenly hit that person …
- No Happiness Other than Peace… That’s why the question that lies at the beginning of wisdom or discernment is, “What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The wisdom lies in the long-term, and it lies in the fact that you recognize you’ve got to do something for this happiness to come about. Then there’s the compassion that comes …
- Observe Yourself in Action… The same with the discernment: You can step back from your concentration, and begin to see the things that go into making it up. This is where you get into dependent co-arising. We look at the list, and it seems awfully abstract, but it’s actually something very near to what’s going on right in our present awareness. You see this clearly …
- As Days & Nights Fly Past… And in choosing, you develop your own powers of discernment. As you begin to see that some ways of breathing feel good for a while but after a while they don’t feel so good, well, you get to change. You try other ways. You also notice how you think about the breath. What kind of concept do you use to picture the breathing …
- Training the Committee… The more we train our mindfulness, the more we train our alertness, our powers of concentration, our discernment, then the more good we can do, the less suffering we cause for ourselves, the less suffering we cause for others. So there are values that underlie this practice and it’s good to keep them in mind. As we’re sitting here focusing on the …
- The Walls of Ignorance… The Buddha’s simply asking us to reflect on it in a way that leads to wisdom, leads to discernment. And it’s embodied in his teachings to Rahula, his son: reflecting on what you’re going to do, your intention before you do something, “Will it lead to harm? Will it lead to happiness?” If it leads to harm, don’t do it …
- The Four Bases of Success… If you simply follow the steps that you’ve read in a book without applying this quality of attentiveness, you never develop your own discernment. Simply going through the motions doesn’t do it. You have to watch. You have to make the practice your practice through your quality of attention, intentness. You’re not here to learn about Buddhism, you’re here to …
- Focus on the Doing… developing powers of concentration, developing your discernment, your sensitivity to what you’re doing in the present moment. This is what gives you a better chance to do things carefully in the future as well and to be able to handle any results of past bad karma that may be lying in wait. So no matter what thought comes up, there is a way …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… But if we develop the qualities of concentration and discernment—these four qualities of the desire to get the mind trained, persistence in doing it, really being intent on doing it, and using our powers of analysis—that can change the mind, make it more reliable. We tend to think of the forest tradition as being very Thai or very northeastern Thai. But when …
- Insight from Jhana… As the concentration gets more settled and refined, you begin to discern things that you didn’t see before—subtle levels of stress you didn’t detect at first. This is one of the reasons why the perception of inconstancy is one of the themes that assists not only with insight, but also with your concentration. The Buddha taught Rahula the theme of inconstancy …
- Worlds… They get a little bit of concentration and they say, “Okay, the next step is discernment.” So they abandon their concentration and destroy it before it’s really had a chance to do its work. We like to figure things out too much in advance. After all, we think we’re clever; it would take less energy, take less time if we could move …
- Basics… It covers the mind’s ability to discern, its ability to be ingenious — in other words, all the qualities of active intelligence. If you see that something is not working in your meditation, use your imagination to figure out another approach that’ll get better results. You can make the breath deeper, you can make it more shallow, you can make it come in …
- Selfing & Not-selfing… there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. So you can exert some control over the aggregates. If you couldn’t exert any control, there’d be no path. Discernment, right view, is a matter of perceptions and thought fabrications. Right resolve—a matter of fabrications and perceptions. All the elements of the path—all the factors of the path—are composed …
- Basic Breath, Basic Insight… There’s discernment, when you begin to see what’s going on in the mind and understand why the mind is creating suffering and also what you can do to put an end to it. And then finally, there’s release: freedom from that suffering. That’s what the teaching is all about. As the Buddha said, that freedom is the heartwood, the core …
- Preparing to Die Well… This is why the skill of discernment is also a matter both of developing and letting go. You have to develop the right sense of values so that you can really let go of unskillful things. As you develop this skill in your meditation, you’re closer and closer to having a skill that’s capable of facing death and handling it well, so …
- The Sport of Wise People… So use the discernment of humor to give yourself a sense of distance from the values of the world. You can step back and realize, “I’m not enmeshed in those things; I don’t have to be enmeshed in those things; those are things that I don’t have to believe in or be impressed by”—and there’s a lightness that comes …
- Skillful Effort… This is one of the reasons why there’s no clear distinction between concentration and discernment, or concentration and wisdom in the teachings of the forest masters. The skills you develop in the course of concentration practice are precisely the skills you’re going to need to turn around and look at pain, the tools you’re learning to master these processes of fabrication …
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