Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Meditate Because You Have To… These are the causes leading to the cessation of suffering. And it’s a funny thing about causes: When you get them right, they give you the results whether you anticipate the results or not.
- Circumspection… the idea we’re suffering because we don’t connect with all our fellow humanity. Well, there are some people you don’t want to connect with because they’ll have a bad influence on you. It’s not that you’re passing judgment on them forever, but you use your judgment, you use your circumspection to see which friendships are actually having a …
- Happiness Comes from Inner Strength… And that, in and of itself, causes stress and suffering. But when you realize that you have more than enough in certain areas, and that there are other people who might benefit from your sharing it with them: That creates a sense of wealth. It’s a sense of wealth that even poor people can have—because generosity is not just a matter of …
- Focused on Results… You can keep it up for a while, but there comes a point where it all breaks down—and you suffer. The second unskillful way of being focused on results is basically impatience. We do something good and we want the results right away, without taking into consideration the fact that we’ve been doing things unskillfully for a long time, and some of …
- Virtues & Values… Well, I found out later that he, too, was in pain, suffering from the mosquitoes biting him. He was ready to give up, but then he opened his eyes and saw this American sitting there. And he couldn’t let himself be beaten by the American. In that way, we kept each other going. So don’t think of meditation as a selfish practice …
- Discernment in Concentration… It’s because we function in this ignorance that we’re creating suffering for ourselves. But if you’re deliberate about what you’re doing as you settle down, you begin to realize, “Okay, this is the form of the body: This is the warmth, this is the coolness, this is the energy, this is the solidity.” This is the feeling: The feeling may …
- Get Out of Yourself… Here I am, miserable, living alone in this little hut, making myself suffer.” A deva appears to him and says, “Do you realize how lucky you are? There are beings going to hell right now, they really envy you because you’re on the way out.” So again, you have to get out of your inner echo chamber by thinking of other beings. There …
- A Strong Post… Luang Puu Dune, one of the teachers in Thailand, said that the mind flowing out the senses is suffering right there. Your attention goes out to latch onto things outside, usually from a sense of weakness or a sense of lack or a sense of wanting. When the mind is feeling weak like that, it’s very rare that it’s going to deal …
- Take Care of Your Tools… The issue is not so much whether you’re better than someone else as it is how good you are at overcoming your own defilements, how good you are at figuring out where you’re still causing stress or suffering and what you can do about it. Those are the issues that are worthwhile to focus on. So whatever comes up in the course …
- Body as Path… What’s special about the Buddha’s path is that it takes the body and uses it in a way that trains the mind so that it doesn’t have to be miserable, doesn’t have to suffer from the body. We were talking this morning about how the path actually takes these khandhas—which are the things we feed on, the things we …
- Enthusiasm… The biggest thing to fear, of course, is that in your effort to find happiness you’re going to do things that will cause suffering; in your effort to do good, you may get so that you lose your enthusiasm to do good, or when the situation gets tough, the virtues that you’ve been trying to develop, the precepts you’ve been trying …
- Effort against the Hindrances… There’s no way at all that you benefit from ill will, wanting to see someone else suffer. You’re just burning yourself up with anger at the moment, and setting yourself up to do unskillful things in the future. There’s no reason you should want to be involved in that kind of thinking. Sleepiness is very seductive, because when it comes on …
- Your Main Foundation… exactly is going on in the mind, and we can sort out all of the different ways that we glom things together and turn them into huge big sticky forms of suffering. This is why, when one of Ajaan Fuang’s students complained that her practice wasn’t making all the fast progress that she wanted, he said, “Look, work on your foundation. Make …
- The Alternative of Concentration… As far as they can see, sensual pleasures are the only alternative to having to suffer pain. But then the pleasures show their drawbacks, and turn painful. So the mind runs back and forth between these things, and the whole political situation in the mind gets determined by what we see as our alternatives. But when you practice concentration, you develop sense of pleasure …
- Old Movies & New… Stories where we suffer, stories where we were miserable, where other people took advantage of us, we like to think about those things. What’s the hook? Part of it, of course, is that we like being portrayed as a victim, because someplace in the story the victim has to come out on top. Or if the victim doesn’t come out on top …
- Sober Up… Some of the causes of suffering, the Buddha says, go away when you simply look at them. But there are a lot that require work. You have to “exert a fabrication,” as he says. You have to look at the way you’re breathing, you have to look at the way you’re talking to yourself, you have to look at the perceptions you …
- Unlearning Helplessness… This is one of the reasons why the Buddha said that conviction in the Buddha’s awakening is a strength, because the whole message of the awakening is that it is possible to follow a path of practice that can lead to the end of suffering through our own efforts. We can make a difference by our decisions. And you live in a world …
- The Light of the World… Rather than just leaving him to his fate, the Buddha was able to teach the Dhamma in such a way that Angulimala wasn’t going to have to suffer in the lower realms. A lot of people were unhappy with that because, literally, he was getting away with murder. But then you take their desire to see him punished, and you compare that with …
- The Samsaric Mud Fight… You’d like to have this kind of pleasure, but no matter what it is, it’s going to cost a certain amount of suffering both for yourself and for other people in the worlds you create around that desire. This is why stopping the process, stopping the addictive habit, is actually good for yourself and for those others. And this is why samsara …
- Delight in the Path… People in Sri Lanka who were reputed by their friends to be really into the Dhamma were given psychological tests, and the conclusion was that they were all suffering from a mild form of depression. They had resigned themselves to the impermanence of things, didn’t have any large scale hopes or expectations—life was gray. That’s what happens when you put the …
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