Search results for: "Suffering"

  1. Page 129
  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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