Search results for: "Suffering"

  1. Page 102
  2. Marshalling the Emotions
     … And the amount of suffering in life: Not only is life fleeting, but there’s a lot of suffering before you fleet totally away. There’s that famous passage where the Buddha says that the waters of the ocean are less than the tears you’ve shed in all your many lifetimes. You’ve drunk more milk from your mother’s breast, whether your … 
  3. Borrowing the Buddha’s Wisdom
     … just opening that possibility, that there is a way to put an end to suffering. The world tells us, “You can assuage or manage your suffering, but there’s no way you’re going to totally end it.” The Buddha’s saying something else. The simple fact that he gives us that message is important. That’s one of the ways in which we … 
  4. Controlling
     … It’s not absolute, but you can learn how to control these things in a way that can take you to the end of suffering. And that’s quite a lot. There may be plenty of events in the world outside that you can’t control. But if you learn how to control your mind, you can accomplish a lot more than could be … 
  5. Precept Meditation
     … Worldly happiness is limited by the fact that one person’s happiness often requires feeding on someone else’s suffering and pain. So there are limitations to the range of the precepts. When you decide to adopt the precept against killing, for example, you decide basically that you yourself are not going to kill and you’re not going to give the explicit order … 
  6. Pleasure & Pain
     … It’s very rare that intentionally pushing yourself in that direction, or allowing that to happen when you have other ways of dealing with it, really impresses upon you the fact that this kind of unskillful thinking is causing suffering. That’s because the mind does have a tendency to discount the suffering because it’s enjoying the unskillful thinking so much. So watch … 
  7. Where the Mind & Body Meet
     … The Buddha went on to say, still it’s not possible to put an end to suffering without finding the end of the cosmos, yet here it is: right here in the body. Here he’s treating the word, loka—which is either cosmos, world, universe—as equivalent to dukkha: suffering and stress. It’s right here in this body with its perception and … 
  8. Fix Your Views
     … There’s never any place where the Buddha defines suffering, say, in other terms aside from the five clinging-aggregates. He never says that they’re the end of suffering. There’s no place where he defines right resolve, say, as being resolved on sensuality. Certain things are right and certain things are wrong, period, across the board. And even though we’re coming … 
  9. Discernment: Commit & Reflect
     … After all, as the four noble truths point out, the cause of suffering isn’t outside. It’s not in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations; it’s not in what other people do or don’t do. It’s in what your own mind does or doesn’t do. Yet the mind’s constantly flowing out, paying attention to things outside, and paying … 
  10. Behind the Scenes
     … You don’t end up creating suffering. This is the main focus of the Buddha’s teachings: the fact that even though we all want happiness, however we define it, we end up creating a lot of suffering for ourselves. And all too often, we’re hardly even aware that we’re responsible for it. We hide it from ourselves. It’s when you … 
  11. Love Me, Love My Defilements
     … But always recognize that these things do cause suffering, and they certainly do obscure the mind. If we want real peace and happiness, we really have to let them go. It’s useful to see these things not as things in the mind but as actions, as habits. Greed is an habitual action. So is anger; so is delusion. These are the ways we … 
  12. Right View from Right Effort
    It takes effort to overcome suffering—something we don’t like to hear. We’d rather think we can just simply sit there and it’ll go away on its own. Or someone else will come and take it away for us. Or maybe we can read a book and understand all about it and that will take care of it. But that’s … 
  13. The Elephant Hunter
     … The Buddha said that if that were the case, there’d be no path to the end of suffering. There would be nothing to do in the present moment, because everything you would do in the present moment was already determined. So the people who reject the teaching on kamma, thinking that it’s teaching determinism, really misunderstand the Buddha. Belief in determinism was … 
  14. A Tradition of Ingenuity
     … What are you paying attention to when you’re suffering from a physical pain? Could you change that? Pay attention to something else? Pay attention in a different way? What are your intentions around the pain, and what intentions do you think the pain has toward you? That, again, is an issue of perception. Maybe the problem lies in how these mental activities interact … 
  15. Look after Yourself Happily
     … When you’re feeling tempted to leave the practice, ask yourself, “I got on this path because I wanted to put an end to suffering. If I get off this path, would it be appropriate? If I go back to doing things I was doing before, or sometimes worse, would it be appropriate?” If you love yourself, no. There’s also a passage where … 
  16. Equanimity on the Path
     … One is to apply it to anything that’s not directly related to the path—issues that have nothing to do with putting an end to suffering—as a way of keeping the mind focused. Remember that the Buddha himself would put issues of that sort aside. No matter how many people would try to force him to answer questions that were not related … 
  17. Pleasant Practice, Painful Practice
     … That makes you more and more sensitive to what the mind is doing to deceive and create unnecessary suffering for itself. As for which of the two main types you fall into, you don’t know that beforehand. This is one of the reasons why we practice both body contemplation and breath meditation. Contemplate the 32 parts of the body. You can add other … 
  18. A Safe Space Inside
     … The views made straight, of course, refer to seeing that suffering and happiness come from your actions. You don’t blame your suffering on the world outside and you don’t attribute your happiness to the world outside. These are things you have to find within. And it’s going to have to be through your own actions, through the practice of virtue, concentration … 
  19. How Right Mindfulness Leads to Right Concentration
     … In other words, you focus on the causes that’ll get you to the end of suffering. So ardency has an element of desire in it: the desire to do this well. And all these three qualities work together. You’re alert to see what you’re doing. You’re mindful not only of where you want to be but also of whatever other … 
  20. Curious About the Process
     … The cause of suffering is not outside. It’s not other people doing things that you don’t like or you think are wrong. It’s the mind’s own way of processing things. It’s like the way they make processed cheese. Part of the problem, of course, is with the raw material. But the big problem is the process. No matter what … 
  21. Changing Your Default Settings
     … You don’t have to add any extra suffering on top of it by breathing in a way that’s weighing you down, or perceiving the issue in a way that’s weighing you down. Look at your perceptions; look at your attention, i.e., what questions you’re attending to. The complaining questions—“Why is this happening to me? Why does it have … 
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