Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. A Pleasure Without Stories
     … How much you suffer over your stories, you can tell other people, but they don’t actually feel it directly. And the relief you feel when you’ve been able to pull yourself out is something you know, but it’s not a story you can really tell to anybody. So we’re looking for a pleasure with fewer and fewer stories—a pleasure … 
  3. Consciousness, Awakened & Not
     … The four noble truths take the same issue and go deeper, focused on the problem of suffering: Where are you causing suffering through what you’re doing? Each of the four noble truths involves an action. Clinging in the first noble truth is something to be comprehended. The craving in the second noble truth is to be abandoned. The third noble truth is dispassion … 
  4. Wise About Pleasure
     … You may think that being reborn as a deva in Zion National Park might be a good thing, but the devas in Zion National Park have their own forms of suffering, their own forms of stress. So you’ve got to keep those limitations in mind, which means that you’ve got to develop another type of pleasure that’s actually part of the … 
  5. Recollection of the Buddha
     … After all, we all want happiness, and yet cravings get us to do a lot of things that make us suffer. Why are we so bamboozled? What in us likes the craving? Why do we listen to it? Meditation allows you to find this out, but you have to stick with it. And to stick with it, you have to go against the craving … 
  6. Heedful, Ardent, & Resolute
     … The experience of awakening would have blotted out any sense that you had suffered on the path. Fortunately, that’s not what we have to do. We don’t have to get speared. But we do have to be heedful, ardent, and resolute. So you need the well-being of concentration to sustain you. Otherwise it gets dry and dull. So allow yourself to … 
  7. Worldly Narratives
     … The reason he taught those truths was because they were useful for putting an end to suffering. So, as he said, he wasn’t the sort of person who would teach things just because other people believed them. He taught rebirth because it’s a really useful truth, in the sense that you reflect on how what you’re doing with your mind, the … 
  8. Using Perceptions
     … After all, our perceptions of the world are the ones that accompany our lack of skill in approaching the issue of suffering. So we have to learn how to step back from them a bit. This is why it’s helpful to think of coming to the Dhamma as going to a new country where the customs are different, the language is different. Their … 
  9. Don’t Worry, Be Focused
     … Brahmas still have self-identity, which means they still suffer, even if it’s only a subtle level. If the mind is really ready, it can actually let go at that point. As for the things you might be worried about, you have to remind yourself that there comes a point where you have to put everything down. You can’t carry the world … 
  10. Hunting & Foraging
     … If you don’t admit the mistake—and it’s usually because you’re in no mood to hear about your own mistakes or to admit to them—then there’s no way you can solve the big problem, which is the unnecessary stress and suffering we cause ourselves. So try to feel at ease with the breath. Ajaan Suwat would talk about having … 
  11. Forgiveness
     … suffering, its cause, the end of suffering, and the path to its end. Many of us make the mistake of wanting to go straight to the transcendent level. Who wants to muck around in the mundane? Especially when you hear the theory about two levels of truth, that there’s just conventional truth and then there’s the Real Thing, so who wants to … 
  12. A Good Buddhist Ego
     … If you die before that work is done, you could suffer a great deal. So, you work on it now. That’s a healthy ego function. The second is altruism, which in Buddhism is called compassion or goodwill. We realize that if our happiness depends on other people’s suffering, they’re not going to stand for it. They’re going to do what … 
  13. The Dhamma Eye
     … For instance, the origination of suffering is craving—and where is craving? It’s in the mind. What’s the origination of the causal chain that leads to craving? It’s ignorance. That, too, comes out of the mind. You then begin to realize all the other things that come out of the mind: fabrication, name-and-form, consciousness, your experience of the six … 
  14. Worldly Equanimity & Its Uses
     … the goal of freedom from suffering. So he’s teaching you the equanimity of a person with a goal. Think of a warrior trying to win a battle. The warrior has to be very stable, with a mind that’s on an even keel, that doesn’t get upset by things, so that he or she can figure the way out of a particular … 
  15. The Lessons of Good Kamma
     … In the same way, if you develop an expansive mind, the results coming from past actions, even though they may be large crystals of salt, don’t necessarily mean you have to suffer. So when the Buddha’s teaching kamma, it’s not primarily for the purpose of making you feel guilty or bad about what you’ve done in the past. He always … 
  16. Breathing to Awakening
     … On the one hand, you have to accept the things you cannot change, but you also have to have an attitude of defiance—that, whatever opportunity you have not to suffer, you’re going to take it. This is why we look into the qualities of the mind. As we get older, the strength of the body goes down, but the mind doesn’t … 
  17. Seeing Through Your Defilements
     … And the path to the end of suffering is a path to the end of that addiction. Even though it may be difficult to let go of some things that, even though you know they’re bad for you, you continue doing them, it’s when you really understand them and can look at them squarely and not get blown away by them: That … 
  18. The Shape of a Circle
     … There will come a point where you finally get it just right and you can leave the system entirely—this system of suffering, this system of things that are inconstant, stressful, not-self, conditioned, unreliable. You don’t have to go anywhere else, just stay in the circle, stay in the ellipse, and someday you’ll be totally free, even of the ellipse. So … 
  19. Inner Wealth
     … The two remaining forms of wealth are learning, learning of the Dhamma—in other words, figuring out, learning what the Buddha had to say, the teachings that help us look for the causes of suffering inside and also look for the cessation of suffering inside through qualities we can develop inside—and then discernment, learning how to apply those teachings so that we get … 
  20. What You’re Bringing
     … And the reason why what we bring to the situation causes suffering is because it’s all done in ignorance. So when we meditate, we’re trying to shine a light into that area, both for the body and in the mind. The thing about ignorance, though, is that it’s not just an empty space. We have our ways of filling in the … 
  21. Stay
     … You see what causes suffering, what doesn’t cause suffering. It’s all right here, but you need the discipline to keep yourself at this point of reference where everything shows itself and where everything can be tested. So when you want to reflect on what’s going on in your life, here is where you find that you haven’t been able to … 
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