Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Skilled in Aims… Then, of course, with the four noble truths, the fact that you’re trying to put an end to suffering shows that you have goodwill for yourself. The way you do it is through the noble eightfold path, and that involves right view, right resolve, all the way down through right concentration, including right speech and right action—again, virtue. You’re acting in …
- At Home in Your Own Skin… As you learn how to inhabit this world properly, you’ll find that you can deal with other worlds with a lot less suffering.
- Cutting New Paths in the Mind… There are lots of ways in which we bring unnecessary suffering onto ourselves, and they tend to be very quick. They’re like paths in the mind over which we’ve walked back and forth many, many times. There’s nothing in the way, we’ve killed all the grass, we’ve cut back all the bushes. We’ve been back and forth so …
- A Goal Without Limits… But still, to do the duty with the fourth noble truth—the path to the end of suffering—we have to have some motivation. We have to convince ourselves that the path does lead to a good end. It’s for this reason that even though the Buddha said that the goal can’t be properly described, and the person attaining the goal can …
- Perfect Breathing Isn’t the Goal… But you have to realize the real causes of your suffering are inside the mind, and they may not manifest themselves in any physical symptom at all. On the other hand, you can have physical symptoms of tension, tightness, illness, but they may not be related to what’s going on in your mind right now. After all, the Buddha himself, after his awakening …
- Take Responsibility for Yourself… You have to keep looking and looking and looking to see where in the mind are you causing yourself suffering in ways that you don’t really have to. If you’re not really meticulous about this, you’ll miss everything. Little signs will be there, but you won’t see them, and yet you’ll wonder why your meditation isn’t progressing. Well …
- Medicine – Timely & Timeless… He says that we suffer because of our misperceptions of things, seeing constancy in what’s inconstant, pleasure in what’s painful, self in what’s not-self, and attractiveness in what’s really unattractive. But he doesn’t then just go and say, “Simply turn your perceptions around and that’s that. The problem is solved.” That’s not how it works. The …
- Happy to Be Here… And you want to watch it because the basic principle of the Dhamma is that the reason we suffer in life is not so much because of things happening outside. It’s because of how we process sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. So we have to learn how to watch our minds to really understand what they’re doing. And one of the …
- How to Really Depend on Yourself… What when you do it will lead to long term harm and suffering? And what when you do it will lead to long term well-being and happiness? Notice that those questions are strategic. You ask them to get some guidance from others, but you also ask them of yourself: to give yourself guidance in how to approach your meditation. To remind yourself of …
- Mindstorms… But as the Buddha pointed out, there’s a lot of suffering in those worlds. They all require effort to keep them going. They have to feed off of something. When the Buddha says that becoming is conditioned by clinging, the word “clinging” can also mean feeding or the act of taking sustenance. And the sustenance is the passion of desire — the desire that …
- Building on Certainty… Look to see how much stress or pain or suffering those intentions are causing and learn how to cause less. Those are the basic instructions. The test is something very immediate: your own immediate experience. And yet for most of us, immediate experience is a big unknown. We don’t look very carefully to things that we should know most intimately—our own intentions …
- Brahmaviharas at the Breath… In other words, your happiness doesn’t have to depend on other people’s suffering, and it doesn’t mean that, in looking after your happiness, you’re ignoring other people’s happiness. Developing happiness through generosity, virtue, meditation, is a way of developing happiness that spreads around, and the dividing line between your well-being and other people’s well-being gets dissolved …
- Preparing to Die Well… Ratthapala illustrates this with the truth of illness, and it’s a truth about suffering as well. He asks the king, “Do you have a recurring illness?” The king says, “Yes, I have a wind illness”—back in those days, they believed that if you had shooting pains and cramps in the body, it was caused by a disturbance of the wind element. “Sometimes …
- Cleansing the Mind… They wanted to see him suffer first. They would throw things at him when he was on his almsround. But you want to ask yourself, “Do you want to be the type of person who throws things at an arahant?” If not, try to develop goodwill even for people who’ve been really evil. May they change their ways. So stop and think if …
- It’s Good to Talk to Yourself… You realize that death could come at any time, and you’ve got work to do in your mind if you want to be ready to die and not suffer from it. Contemplation of the body helps with all kinds of issues. If you have issues around lust, you can think about the different parts of the body and realize there’s nothing there …
- Defilements… They lead you by the nose, getting you to do all kinds of stupid things, but then when the karma from the stupid things comes, they don’t suffer. It’s like people who convince you to go down and break a store window or something and then, of course, when you do that, they run away and the police catch you. So, as …
- Being Your Own Teacher… It’s the inside teacher who bears ultimate responsibility for figuring out why you’re suffering, what can be done about it, learning to get better and better at detecting even the subtlest levels of stress, and being willing to listen to some of the teachings that may strike you as most foreign. I’ve noticed over the years that when I teach in …
- Dissolving Your Thoughts… He has you ponder those thoughts to develop an attitude of equality with other beings, so that you don’t look down on the people who are suffering and you’re not jealous of the people who are ahead of you. And you can use the same attitude with your thoughts. Wonderful thoughts come through the mind, you’ve been there before. Horrible childish …
- Focal Points… If you function totally in a materialistic universe, it’s going to make you suffer. And yet when we come to meditation, even though part of us realizes that materialism is a miserable way of thinking, we still carry a lot of materialistic assumptions into the mind. So turn things around. Awareness comes first, the material world later. You’re experiencing things from within …
- Light Your Way… You have to be virtuous, generous, develop your discernment, so that you can understand how the mind is creating suffering for itself. And then when you get there, you have to be extra specially careful, not to get complacent. If you have this right attitude, it’s like driving in a car. You’re driving at night, but you’ve got headlights. As long …
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