Search results for: "Suffering"

  1. Page 128
  2. Where the Brightness Is
     … If you find that a particular way of speaking or thinking has been causing suffering, causing stress, it’s a burden to the mind, you don’t have to do it. One of the people on the retreat had been spending too much time in a Zen center. He said, “All this focusing on your actions is distracting us from opening to the unconditioned … 
  3. Cornered
     … for the sake of freeing yourself from suffering, for arriving at dispassion, cessation, release. This is where Ajaan Mun’s interpretation of practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma is in line with the Canon. There, they seem to assume that, as they teach the Dhamma, there’s no question about it: You just follow the Dhamma. Of course, you test it. You … 
  4. Stay Tuned
     … On the one hand we’re trying to overcome craving for becoming, which is one of the causes of suffering. But the path we follow is one that brings something into being. We do some becoming, but it’s a tactical sort of thing. As you stay consistently with the breath, you start to understand things better, you see things more clearly. It’s … 
  5. A Sense of Well-being
     … When the texts describe dependent co-arising, one of the basic patterns starts with name and form and consciousness acting together to create all the processes leading up to suffering. Well, intention is an important part of “name.” It’s one of the major causal factors in how we experience things. And you can see it operating here as you practice concentration. You also … 
  6. Vows
     … You have to see that you’re suffering in ways that you’re tired of and you realize that the solution has to lie inside, has to be found inside, has to be developed inside. That’s the realization that keeps us on the path. At the same time, we see other people who are doing well in the practice and it should encourage … 
  7. Learning from Determination
     … The five aggregates are inherently suffering. And you’ll see automatically that they’re not worth coming back to. They’re not worth desiring. Nothing’s worth desiring. When you’re learning a skill, though — and I noticed this with Ajaan Fuang — you’re very upfront about the fact that there is desire, and desire is going to be a necessary part of learning … 
  8. A Refuge from Modern Values
     … If it hadn’t been for him as our admirable friend, where would we be? How would we know anything about the noble eightfold path? How would we know anything about the path to the end of suffering? The practice unfolds in the context of our friendships, which means that you have to choose your friends well: the people you hang around with, the … 
  9. De-thinking
     … those factors of the Path, the qualities you’re developing in your mind, the clarity of awareness, the steadiness of awareness…How can they be used to understand the questions of suffering and stress?” These are good questions. But even with good questions you have to have a sense of time and place. And it’s important to keep your questions limited to what … 
  10. Brahmaviharas & the Breath
     … They saw her abstract painting and they started taunting her. “What is this—this crap here? This doesn’t look like anything.” She looked at them, and all she could see was how much they were suffering. She felt an immense goodwill for them, immense compassion. So without even having any thought of fear at all, she started explaining her painting to them. It … 
  11. Skillful Attachments
     … But if you realize that you have other choices, you can find better things to latch on to and cause less suffering. Otherwise, you latch on to things, and they basically take over, push you out. A feeling comes up, you latch on to it, and all of the sudden the feeling seems to occupy your whole body, and you have no room in … 
  12. Oozing Bodies, Oozing Minds
    One of the explanations for the causes of suffering traces them back to something called asava. This is one of those Pali terms that’s hard to translate, but there are two translations that get to an idea of what asava is. One is effluent, something that comes flowing out of the mind. Usually in English we think of an effluent as something dirty … 
  13. The Three Perceptions & Their Opposites
     … If you don’t let them go, you suffer from what are called the corruptions of insight, where you latch on to an experience or an insight and think you’ve reached the goal. You’re blind to the fact that you’re still hanging on. Even though the principle of these three characteristics applying to all fabricated things may be true, there’s … 
  14. Use Your Imagination
     … For instance, what the Buddha had to say about how suffering comes from clinging to any one of the five aggregates: Which aggregate are you clinging to? Which form of clinging are you holding on to? His terms of analysis are meant to be food for your imagination, to open up possibilities. Maybe you think of the pain as a physical thing, but remember … 
  15. Dualities
     … He’s trying to help you sensitize yourself to the way you’re causing yourself suffering. When he’s talking about emptiness, it’s not some far away and abstract thing. On one level, it’s an emptiness of disturbance. On another level, you use the emptiness of self as a tool to let go of some of the disturbances you really like so … 
  16. A World of Limitations
     … But there is something that can be done, that can be brought to a real conclusion, and that’s putting an end to suffering. That’s the one task where they can truly say, “The task is done.” This is one of the constant refrains in the texts, when someone becomes an arahant and has finally gotten rid of all the defilements: “The task … 
  17. Responsible Happiness
     … We see people who have trouble handling these things, and they’re a burden to everybody else, especially at the point where nobody else can do anything for them yet it still is obvious that they’re suffering. It really tears at the heart: the people you want to help but you can’t help them. And we don’t want to be like … 
  18. Disposable Worlds
     … to understand the movements of the mind, particularly the movements where it’s unskillful, creating suffering for itself that it doesn’t have to. And that’s most clearly seen in a mind that’s adept at settling down and being still.
  19. Change
     … Just learn how to accept change and then you won’t suffer. But that’s another misunderstanding. He said that there is a deathless happiness. There is a dimension that we can touch that doesn’t change. People get the context here mixed up. They think that the Buddha starts with the idea that everything changes and then tells you to try to look … 
  20. Wilderness Wealth
     … You see that the problem of suffering is not anything “out there.” It’s largely in the way you perceive things, the way you fabricate things. And the process of meditation is a progressively refined understanding of that teaching—an understanding that goes deeper and deeper, gets more and more subtle, but it follows the same basic principle all down the line. So learn … 
  21. Commit & Reflect All Around
     … What you need is what the Buddha calls, “penetrative” knowledge, in which you understand some activity of the mind, good or bad; notice what’s causing it; notice its diversity—as the Buddha calls it—which means seeing what ways it’s good, what ways it’s bad; what’s the range of suffering or happiness that this particular phenomenon—like feelings or perceptions … 
  22. Load next page...