Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Treasures from the East… You can also see how to avoid suffering around that particular quality. So, you’re not just watching things coming and going. Your knowledge is penetrating. It sees cause and effect, and especially, it sees cause and effect in your own mind. As you meditate, you’re not just watching things come and go. You’re actually actively giving rise to a state of …
- Judging Mindfulness & Concentration… to figure out within yourself how the Buddha went about putting an end to suffering. We read it in the books. We get some general ideas. That’s all you can get from the books: general ideas and a few techniques. But learning how to master the techniques, learning how to apply them, is going to require your own process of observation, commitment, reflection …
- Mistakes… And the Buddha’s pointing out that we do these things in ignorance, and because we’re in ignorance, we cause suffering for ourselves, for the people around us. In other words, we’re making mistakes. The attachment itself is a kind of mistake. We do something, thinking we’re going to get good results out of it, but we’re not getting good …
- Grounded in the Breath… And wouldn’t you like to be able to see the error of your ways on your own and not have to deal with a lot of suffering before you change your ways? Well, grant the same generous attitude toward other people. At the same time, wishing goodwill for all beings helps put you in a better frame of mind. You’ve got a …
- Joy in Effort… Then they look at what they’re doing to see how it helps in bringing suffering to an end. What this means in practice is that you learn how to question your efforts in terms of the four noble truths until you arrive at something that lies beyond effort, beyond the path. But you can’t get to the “beyond” unless you go through …
- From Dependence to Independence… But we suffer because of our own lack of skill within, and it’s from within that we have to solve the problem, to develop skill for ourselves. But the Buddha gives you the tools, points out aspects of what it’s like to be inside a mind, inside a body, that you can use to your advantage. You can use the breath to …
- Why We Bow Down… It’s because there is the possibility of finding an end to suffering by developing dispassion that we actually would try to have some dispassion for our cravings. That’s why we would be willing to adopt those three perceptions—inconstancy, stress, not-self—and apply them to the things we’re attached to. People sometimes say we can see these things all around …
- Surprise Yourself… If you couldn’t change things right now, he said, the path to the end of suffering would be impossible. But the fact that things are not totally shaped by the past gives you some leeway right now to make a difference. So play with that. Ask questions that you never asked before. Try to use perceptions you never used before. That’s how …
- Nobody’s Servant… Because if our internal resources are in bad shape, our inside portfolio’s pretty weak, then no matter how good our outside portfolio is, we’re going to suffer a lot. So you have to learn to think about what’s really important in life, and realize that the quality of the mind is your real treasure. Get your priorities straight, along with the …
- A Mental Fortress… One of the worst ways you can harm yourself is if you do something hoping for somebody to suffer, and then you have to live with the results of that action. If you really mean ill, it’s a hard, hard action to look back on. It really weighs heavily on the mind. But if you mean well and then try to go beyond …
- Compunction & Awe… We have power within ourselves to begin with, the power of our actions, which could be used in unskillful ways and cause us to suffer. So have a strong sense of compunction about what you do. Take care about the consequences of your actions. But also have a sense that you’re going for something bigger than the world, bigger than even the physical …
- Opportunities Everywhere… There are always opportunities to sidestep suffering, to sidestep unskillful mental states. This is probably one of the most important teachings: that regardless of how bad a situation may be, at least you always have the freedom to choose to do something skilful, even if it simply means abstaining from some unskillful things—and even if it means making a lot of sacrifices. But …
- Doing the Practice… Right view means seeing where there’s suffering right now, where there’s stress right now, and then seeing the craving, the ignorance that caused it. That’s part of right view as well. You want to see these things as they’re actually happening. This way, you begin to sort out the patterns of the mind, and you begin to see that some …
- Levels of Truth… He simply analyzes the problem of suffering. This is for use when your powers of concentration get better and you can start analyzing things simply in terms of stress, the mental movements that are causing the stress, and what to do so you can see those mental movements and see the stress, and learn how to put an end to the stress by putting …
- Home Schooling Your Inner Children… You can have everything else in the world going really well for you, but if your mind is a mess, you can create all sorts of suffering. In fact, people with untrained minds who gain wealth and power are the ones who create all the big problems in the world. So remind yourself of how important it is to meditate, and how much you …
- Resourceful… If you want to put an end to suffering, this is what you’ve got to do. Certain things you have to avoid, certain things you have to develop: You keep that in mind. And then you find that there are large chunks of meditation where even with the stories you’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t work and the principles …
- Wise about Happiness… The cause of suffering is something you do. You crave. You cling. The path is something you do. You develop all the factors from right view all the way through to right concentration, to overcome that tendency to crave and to cling. These are all things we’re doing and we want to learn how to do them well, to learn how to abandon …
- Right Speech… And as a meditator you can’t engage in that sort of justification at all, because that’s precisely the ignorance that’s going to keep you suffering. As for harsh speech, you don’t want to yell at yourself in a way that gets you discouraged on the path, but there are other times you have to come down hard on yourself. You …
- Delight in Concentration… It’s interesting that he uses that word, because part of the definition of the craving that leads to clinging and suffering is delight: “delighting now here, now there.” But there are also ways of taking delight that are helpful on the path. The first is taking delight in the Dhamma itself: the fact that there is this teaching that’s been kept alive …
- Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening… Then you reflect on the fact that if you want your happiness to last, it can’t depend on the suffering of other people, because they want happiness too. So you have to keep their happiness, their well-being in mind. At the very least, make sure that your happiness doesn’t oppress them. That’s the beginning of compassion. And finally purity is …
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