Search results for: "Suffering"

  1. Page 115
  2. Cutting the Fetters
     … the same aggregates that go into your sense of self; the same aggregates that, when you cling to them, are suffering. But here you have them in a very pleasant state. You’ve got the breath, which is form. You’ve got the feeling of pleasure that goes with the breath: That’s feeling. You’ve got the perception that holds you with the … 
  3. Good Heart, Good Mind
     … Not holding any grudges against anyone, not wishing to see anybody suffer. But a good heart requires more than goodwill. On the one hand, it needs guidance. It can’t simply go on good intentions and hope that that will take care of everything. Think of the Buddha’s instructions to his son. You look at your actions before you do them in terms … 
  4. Diagnosing the Mind
     … But what you do know is that if the mind is prepared, it’s going to be able to face those things without having to suffer. And the preparation will come from where? It’ll come from developing mindfulness, alertness, concentration, and discernment here in the present moment. As for moods that you like or don’t like, as the Buddha said those are … 
  5. Driving Lessons
     … In this case, we’re here to develop peace of mind, to gain insight, to understand why it is that we’re causing unnecessary suffering for ourselves. To understand that, we have to get the mind to settle down so that it can observe itself clearly. And to get the mind to settle down, you’ve got to give it a good place to … 
  6. Expanding Your Awareness
     … You realize that there has been a lot of suffering in providing those things. Some beings gave their lives—and not willingly. There are the people who’ve had to help in the transport of these things, in the preparation, and it finally gets to you, simply because you’ve got this body that needs these things. They say in the suttas that one … 
  7. Stay with the Breath
     … Yet the only way you can get around unskillful thinking, any kind of thinking that creates suffering, is to look at the process, to see how jerry-rigged the whole thing is, how arbitrary it is: all the make-believe that the mind engages in, all the messages it sends back and forth that say, “Make-believe this is this, and that’s that … 
  8. In the Mood
     … You can get thrown through the windshield or suffer whiplash. But if you learn how to think in ways that are for your own true benefit — like the things we chant about every evening, which are always beneficial to think about — then when the time comes for the mind to settle down and think less and less and less and get more and more … 
  9. The Kamma of Concentration
     … They get killed once, but you may have to endure a long, long time of suffering because of that action. If you want to harm other people, he said, you get them to break the precepts because, after all, they’re agents, too. They’re engaging in actions and they’re going to be experiencing happiness or pain based on their actions. So when … 
  10. The Raft
     … Which means that we take these different aggregates that we use usually to make ourselves suffer and put them to a new and better purpose. That’s what the Buddha meant when he said that you take the twigs and the branches and the leaves on this side of the river and you make them into a raft. You take what you’ve got … 
  11. Growing Up Inside
     … The other quality is restraint, realizing there are a lot of things that you might like to do, and that the children in your mental committee might like to do, but if you give in to those impulses, it’s going to be bad; you’re going to suffer. This is another reason why we have the meditation to fall back on. The sense … 
  12. Respect for the Precepts
     … The precepts, though, are for you to look at your actions and to figure out where you’re causing unnecessary stress and suffering. They’re elemental to the practice. If you hold to them carefully, you have to start looking at your whole life a lot more carefully, too. That way, you can detect attachments you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. And only when … 
  13. A Recipe for Jhana
     … When you’re sick, when you’re bored, when you’re anxious, whatever the situation outside, you realize, “I may not be able to change the situation outside, but I can change my perception so that I don’t have to suffer so much. And when I’m not adding any excess suffering, this makes things lighter for other people as well.” So there … 
  14. Fear & Anger
     … If you see that a particular line of thinking is causing a lot of stress and suffering, remember: Abandoning is the task you do with the cause of stress. To drop that line of thinking, you actually have to change it, to think in the opposite way. Deep down you may feel, “This body is me.” Well, what if it’s not you? How … 
  15. Immersed in the Body
     … Those blind spots are ignorance, and it’s precisely because of the ignorance that we suffer. So as you begin to settle down and the breath begins to feel good, allow yourself to plunge into the body. Put the breath on. Wear it. Remember that image of the man with the white cloth surrounding his body. You want your awareness to be all-around … 
  16. Endurance with a Purpose
     … Both of those things bring a lot of suffering, a lot of pain. Think about the human body: When we’re born, just as our mothers were giving birth, we went through a lot of pain. And there was nobody to explain it to us at the time. The body has had its pains here and there ever since then. For a while it … 
  17. Creating Your Environment
     … Have a sense of urgency about this, because otherwise you just keep coming back, coming back, coming back, and suffering again and again and again, and causing suffering again and again. How much longer do you want to do that? Now, these thoughts can get pretty depressing unless you also have a sense of confidence that there is a way out. The Buddha showed … 
  18. Intelligent about Change
     … that human beings can do this, can put an end to suffering, and that it’s a really worthwhile project. Even if the project goes more slowly than you would hope, you can’t say, “Well, I'll just give up on this for the time being and pursue something else,” because this thought will then be constantly nagging away at the back of … 
  19. Guardian Meditations
     … Why do I have this disease? Why do I suffer so at death?” They can develop wrong view as a result, and that pulls them down. Which means that the good that they’ve done will still show its results sometime, but it may be a long time before it does. But then the Buddha also awakened to the fact that you can put … 
  20. Present Kamma
     … He has you focus on present karma—what you’re doing right now—because what you’re doing right now can make all the difference between whether you’re going to suffer from your past karma or not. If your present karma is skillful—in other words, your attentions and intentions and perceptions are skillful—then even when bad things are coming in from … 
  21. Anupassana
     … You don’t have much control over the results of past actions, but you do have control over what you’re doing right now, and you want to see, “What am I doing right now that’s causing suffering? Can I fabricate things in a way that causes less suffering?” With the breath, you can see that it is a kind of fabrication. The … 
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