Key Teachings of Buddhism - An Overview of the Path

"The Buddha talks about different levels of discernment. To begin with, there’s the discernment that comes from listening or reading, and the discernment that comes from thinking things through. And although it’s important to master those levels of discernment, the really important level is the discernment that comes from actually developing skillful qualities in the mind. That’s when you get hands-on practice.

And as you work on the factors of the path, they do their work on your mind. The mind becomes more sensitive, more alert to what it’s doing, more open to the possibility that the suffering you’re experiencing in life is not something you can blame on other people, or on conditions beyond your control. The essential suffering that’s weighing down the mind is something that you’ve been creating through your own actions, and you can learn how to stop. That’s what abandoning means. You realize that there’s something you’ve been doing over and over again and you don’t have to do it. So you stop.

The way to get yourself to stop is to see that these actions really aren’t worth doing. Whatever pleasure you get out of them is nothing compared to the pain that you’re causing. You have to see that fact in action, as it’s happening, if you want to be able to drop that particular habit. And often the habits we have to drop are the ones we really, really, really like. Only by getting the mind a lot more sensitive will you be able to see through that liking, to see through the blindness and the ignorance that underlies it, so that you’re willing to let go.

This is why we’re sitting here with our eyes closed, focused on the breath. We’re not off reading through the texts and trying to learn all we can about what the texts have to say. We’re here looking at our own breath to see what our actions have to say — when viewed from the point of view of a mind that’s centered, still, clear, stable here in the present moment. That’s the point from which we can develop a more refined sense of where there’s suffering and what action it’s coming from, so that once we really sees where it comes from, we can let go. We can stop." ~ ThanissaroBhikkhu "An Overview of the Path"