Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. Fighting Attitude
     … In Ajaan Mun’s final Dhamma talk he said, “There are lots of things you’ve got to let go of in the practice, but the one thing you hold onto is your determination to see things through to the end of suffering.” That’s your inner warrior. And so the knowledge that comes from developing the mind through meditation: Often it’s unexpected … 
  11. Negotiating with Death
     … As long as we identify with these things, we’re going to suffer. And not only that, we’re going to do things that are unskillful in our attempt to hang onto them. The question comes up, “Why did he choose these five categories? There are lots of other ways you could divide up the processes of the mind. And the answer seems to … 
  12. A Friend to the World
     … Here we’re talking about someone who’s more than just an ordinary, everyday good person but someone who can really see into the causes of suffering and their end. Now, the ideal way to have friendship with this sort of person is to engage this person in discussion about these qualities, and to try to emulate them. So basically when you’re spreading … 
  13. Finding the Openings
     … It has rain, it has all kinds of things to make you suffer if you open yourself up to them. And yes, we’re often told that part of the practice is to be open to things, but I still haven’t found that teaching in the Pali Canon. The only openness the Buddha advises is when you’re open about your past or … 
  14. Put Some Heart into Your Practice
     … You realize that if your happiness depends on the suffering of others, it’s not going to last. When you’ve found something good, the wise attitude is to want to share it, and not just hold it for yourself. So, getting the mind into concentration requires an attitude of generosity. The same with virtue: Virtue is perfected at stream entry, which is a … 
  15. True Freedom of Speech
     … In other words, you’ve understood what the big problem in life is—the problem of suffering—and that the problem comes from within. It comes from what you’re choosing to do, starting with the thoughts of the mind. Then you realize that from the thoughts in the mind, it comes out your mouth. This means that that’s the first place you … 
  16. The Allure of Self
     … So you want to notice when you pick one up, especially one that involves suffering: Why? That’s the next step. You’ve seen the origination, what causes it. You’ve seen the fact that it passes away. Then when it comes back, you go for it again. What’s the allure? A lot of things we identify with, when you really look at … 
  17. Don’t Just Do It
     … It’s full of koans… lots of questions to which there is no answer, like: ‘What is the cause of suffering’?” Well, it just so happens there is an answer to that question. And that’s the whole point of asking the question to begin with—to arrive at useful answers. In this case, we’re trying to arrive at an ultimate happiness, an … 
  18. Death Is Normal
     … The grief you have can be turned to compassion as you think about all the people in the world who’ve suffered a loss. You see them walking up and down the streets all the time. They’re everywhere—people carrying a loss around. That thought transmutes your grief into compassion, which is a more uplifting and more useful emotion. But before you get … 
  19. The Dhamma Wheel in the Heart
     … He’s not a god who comes down and says, “You’ve got to do this.” He’s just saying, “If you want to put an end to suffering, this is what you have to do.” It’s the same on each level of right view. On the first level, mundane right view, it’s belief in the principle of karma and in the … 
  20. Skillful Papañca
     … You end up taking on identities that can lead to a lot of suffering. You can ask yourself, as an agent: What do I want to do? And how can I best do it? And take as your identity the decision to not neglect discernment, to guard the truth, to be devoted to relinquishment, and to train for calm. As for yourself as the … 
  21. Objectivity
     … Be very clear about what you don’t want to identify with, what causes suffering. That way, you take your partiality for happiness and you turn it into a reason to be more and more objective, less and less inclined to side with one point of view over another without good evidence. So even though the mind tends to be partial, you can find … 
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