Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Testing Karma
     … You can act in such a way that you can really put an end to suffering. Now, when you first hear these things, you can’t prove them, at least not in an empirical way. So the Buddha offers a pragmatic test to begin with. Just think: If you believe that you have choices and that they determine your experience of pleasure and pain … 
  3. Dhamma Medicine
     … You want to have genuine medicine, and you want make sure that it’s beneficial for the particular disease that the patient is suffering from. You also have to make sure that it’s timely: right for that particular point in the course of treatment. Years back, when I was in Thailand, I went to India to visit the Buddhist holy spots. When I … 
  4. Sucked into the Tube
     … When you see through that, then you’ve seen through a lot, cut through a lot of the ignorance that causes the mind’s habit of fabrication to lead to stress and suffering—because you catch these things in the act.
  5. A Special Time
     … If the mind isn’t trained, then all the other good things you gain in life could actually lead to suffering. In other words, you gain something good but your thinking runs out of control. You decide that your happiness depends on this thing or that person or that relationship or whatever. Of course, you realize deep down inside that this thing or that … 
  6. The Mind Comes First
     … It doesn’t create any extra suffering. So always keep the mind first. Even though there are things outside that you can’t change, the fact that the mind is always coming first means that it’s not going to get worked up. It has its independence. And it’s by putting the mind first that we find true release.
  7. Your One Responsibility
     … Mindfulness helps, in that it helps you remember what’s going to lead to suffering and what’s not. Alertness is what keeps you right here in the present moment: the direct experience of what’s happening and particularly of what you’re doing while you’re doing it. Finally, ardency is your desire to do it well. You want to focus that desire … 
  8. Refuge
     … Paralyzed from the base of the spine on down, he’d suffered lung damage, brain damage. So his ability to give Dhamma talks was severely curtailed. When he did give Dhamma talks, either formally or informally, he realized he had to boil the message down to the most essential, most important points. And he always talked about refuge: taking the Buddha, the Dhamma and … 
  9. On Top of Your Actions
     … So all these factors of the path, even the outside ones, are focused back in, right here, because right here is where you’re generating suffering and this is where you can learn how to stop it. So try to bring your attention to what you’re doing right now. Your ability to reflect on your state of mind, reflect on the actions of … 
  10. Teaching Old Selves New Tricks
     … that process of verbal fabrication that the Buddha says lies so close to the very beginning of the processes that lead to suffering. Think about how the Buddha himself would teach people. He would instruct, rouse, urge, and encourage. Three of the four have to do with getting motivated, getting you confident that this is something you can do. The instruction there, of course … 
  11. An Island in the Flood
     … If you have any doubts about that, you can talk to yourself a bit about why the mind needs training, and how all the big problems of the world come down to the fact that the mind is creating a lot of unnecessary suffering for itself, but it can learn how not to do that. This is how you do it. So whatever problems … 
  12. Potentials
     … But the teaching on karma also means that simply because you’ve got some bad things coming in from the past doesn’t mean you have to suffer from them right now. This is where the skills you develop in the present moment make a huge difference. One of the potentials we can develop in the mind is not being easily swayed by pleasure … 
  13. Everybody Benefits
     … It really helps see through a lot of things that you didn’t see before, but it also has to be motivated by the desire to see through them—particularly, to see through the things that are causing suffering. Even though equanimous awareness may seem totally without preference, it is motivated by the desire to see things clearly in a way that you haven … 
  14. Songkran Blessing
     … And then the discernment to see which ways you’re causing unnecessary suffering and how you can stop. These five strengths are the things that will carry you through. They’ll make sure that whatever other blessings you gain in life do stay as blessings and don’t become curses. So think about taking the blessing of wanting mindfulness and discernment so you can … 
  15. The Courage to Set Yourself Free
     … In this way, the lessons you learn about how the mind creates suffering where it doesn’t have to can liberate you in ways that you wouldn’t imagine. So that’s one of the lessons to be drawn from that story Ajaan Lee tells. The other lesson is that when you are fighting other people off, you fight them off with goodwill. There … 
  16. Issues
     … The whole controversy is built out of clinging, so it’s going to entail suffering. So it’s good to look at the various issues that you face as you go through the day to see: How many of them are issues where you really do have to get involved? How many of them are issues that are forced on you, or your standard … 
  17. Skillful Fears
     … They will happen, but if you develop the proper mental skill, you can experience them and not suffer. That’s what the passage in the description of five future dangers is all about: realizing that aging, illness, separation, and death are going to come, social unrest is going to come, and you’ve got to develop these five strengths in the mind to reach … 
  18. Go Out of Your Way
     … It’s not natural that people put an end to suffering, that they will put an end to this process of wandering on. The natural thing is just to keep wandering and wandering around. If you want to find awakening, if you want to find true happiness, you have to go out of your way. Otherwise, when you get into a state of concentration … 
  19. A Gift of Strength
     … These are just a few of the things that add unnecessary stress and suffering. When the mind is well fed, well nourished through the concentration, then it can see these things for what they are. If it isn’t, you tend to identify with them, and if someone tells you to let them go, you say,” I can’t let them go. That’s … 
  20. Practice Without Gaps
     … But as he later explained, he said, “No, an important part of mindfulness practice and concentration practice is creating a good foundation in the way you live your life.” As you get practice in not making exceptions in instances where the precepts might be awkward or cause you to suffer some financial loss or loss of your health: When you’re used to not … 
  21. Getting into the Body
     … Or if it’s a problem that you can’t change, at least you have a different perspective on it, so that you can see what you can do not to suffer from it. So it’s important that you pay careful attention to what’s going on in the body. One of our problems in the West is that we have a very … 
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