Search results for: "Suffering"
- Page 130
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Healing Your Energy… It soothes a lot of the different wounds you’ve suffered. We’ve picked up wounds, not just physical wounds, but also mental wounds from things people have said and done to us—and also from habits we’ve picked up. Those are the worst ones, because we wound ourselves again and again. Sometimes even just the way you breathe is wounding. So it …
- 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 …
- 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.
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Load next page...
