Search results for: "Suffering"
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- All Dhamma, All the Time… As a young prince, he noticed he was suffering. He didn’t blame his father, he didn’t blame his mother, he didn’t blame the surroundings. He realized, “I’m looking for happiness in the wrong place. What if I were to look in another place?” That set the pattern for his entire quest. He’d run up against a wall. “Okay, what …
- Stepping Back… You realize how long you’ve been wandering around, misled by your thoughts, and how totally deluded you were, and how much suffering it caused. Then when you can step out — really step out, even out of that base of concentration — an enormous burden is lifted. In its place you gain both a sense of the solidity of that new dimension, and the confidence …
- Mind Your Own Business… to you. As for the ones that don’t fall to you? You let them go. And the duties that do fall to you are what? As we chanted just now: Suffering is to be comprehended, its cause is to be abandoned, its cessation is to be realized, and the path to its cessation is to be developed. That’s a pretty demanding set …
- Encourage Yourself… But what kind of life would it be like if we didn’t have ideals, if we didn’t have a sense of direction? We’d just be floundering around and there’d be that question, “Where is this going? What is this all about?” There’s so much pain, so much suffering going on in this world, that if we don’t make …
- Training for Happiness… This is why the Buddha’s path is not just one of doing a meditation practice, but it’s also a matter of having right views, understanding the principle of action, how action can lead to happiness, how action can lead to suffering, and learning to be more and more sensitive to this power of choice you have in the present moment. So when …
- Three Levels of Concentration… When pain comes, what do you do with it? When pleasure comes, what do you do with it? Instead of simply suffering from the pain or enjoying the pleasure, you learn how to work with these things so that they can take the mind to a deeper level of concentration. What happens when you work with that sense of pleasure and broaden your awareness …
- Concentration Food… These three forms of craving are part of the cause of suffering. Those are to be abandoned. But the desire to do this well is part of the path. Which means it’s to be developed. So, we work on mindfulness. We work on ardency. We work on alertness. We work on using our directed thought and evaluation, our inner conversation, in a way …
- Keep the Mind from Wandering… That cuts through a lot of unnecessary suffering right there. It also means that when the time comes that you’re actually facing death, you’ll have practiced. You won’t just go wandering off into whatever pops into your mind. It’s an important skill. It’s an important thing to remember. This is process of wandering around in your thoughts is precisely …
- Equanimity in Action, Equanimity at Rest… There’s that idea if you want things to be different from the way they are, that’s craving, and craving’s a cause of suffering. And you shouldn’t do that. But if you can’t want things to be different from the way they are, how are you going to follow the path? How are you going to develop anything on the …
- Calm… If you stay in line with the Dhamma, then you’re on the path going in the right direction, the path to the end of suffering. It’s a good path to be on.
- The Heart to Keep Going… If you don’t aim at the goal, life in samsara is going to take even longer, with a lot more suffering along the way. Each step you take—as long as it’s in the right direction—is a step well made. Learn how to encourage yourself in that way. That, too, is an important skill to take out of the meditation and …
- The Sport of Wise People… Of course, our purpose is serious, the practice is serious—we’re dealing with a big problem, the problem of suffering—but if you’re grim about the path, that grimness begins to grind you down. So you have to learn how to develop a light attitude around what you’re doing. One of the skills of meditation is learning how to gladden the …
- Five Precepts, Five Virtues… You see clearly that your actions will make a difference between whether you’re going to be happy or suffering. And you realize you have to be really careful about what you do, say, and think. You can’t just go with every urge that comes into the mind. You have to stop and think, “When I do this, what are the results going …
- When You Don’t Like Your Selves… The Buddha’s full of recommendations on how you can learn how to create new senses of self, develop new skills, as part of the path to the end of suffering. This is one of our problems: We have a limited range of skills. Even though we have many, many types of self in there, each of them has a script. Sometimes the scripts …
- Recollection of the Buddha… In terms of the compassion, if your happiness depends on the suffering of other people, they’re not going to stand for it. It’s not going to last. So if you want a lasting happiness, you have to think about the well-being of others. That’s compassion. And then you really have to carry through. You look at your actions again and …
- A Safe Home… You also see the connection between acting on an unskillful motivation and the suffering that comes as a result of the action. When you’ve got mindfulness and alertness working together, your choices and decisions get better and better informed. As you learn to associate them with a sense of ease and well-being, they get stronger within the mind. So as we’re …
- Perceptions of the Breath… You want to find a perception that gathers in the calm, solid, alert factions of the mind, the factions that really do want to put an end to suffering and are willing to do what’s needed. As they get stronger, you find you’ll attract other factions of the mind to your cause as well. Find which perceptions are useful, which perceptions are …
- Equanimity as a Skill… May all beings be freed from their suffering. May all beings not be deprived of the good fortune they have attained.” It’s “may, may, may.” But then the fourth one is not like that. It’s a statement of fact: “All living beings are the owners of their actions.” When I was in France this last month, I came across the French translation …
- Fangs in the Static… As soon as you get a body, you’re opening yourself up to the possibility of suffering from this disease or that. Is that what you really want? In another place, the Canon talks about the fact that simply having a body means that you’re subject to people yelling at you, subject to people hitting you. There are a lot of drawbacks to …
- Anger… You’re suffering not from the person’s words, but from what you’re thinking to yourself. So think in new ways. Let the sound stop at the ear. When you approach anger in this way—taking it apart—then you can reassemble a better state of the mind, a state of mind that’s clearer, much more able to think about what would …
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