Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Appreciating Dispassion
     … It puts an end to the round of coming back again and again—suffering the same aging, illness, death, and separation over and over again. It uproots any sense of attachment or nostalgia for the things we’ve loved in the past. Then there’s dispassion, followed by cessation. That sounds kind of scary, but you realize that everything that you’ve created through … 
  3. Loving Yourself Wisely
     … So when you find people who are suffering from self-hatred, it’s not so much that they don’t really love themselves. They love themselves, but there’s a conflict. They’re disappointed in themselves. And the Buddha’s right: If you just go looking for your immediate pleasures without any concern about the consequences, there’s very little to respect. And it … 
  4. Modest, Unentangled, Unburdensome
     … They don’t need to know what you’re doing, because, after all, the big problem is your problem—the way you’re causing suffering for yourself. If you’re able to make progress in that area, fine. If you have something to share with others, you share it in a way where you’re not bragging. You try to stay modest. But as … 
  5. Honesty & Integrity
     … all the unnecessary stories, all the unnecessary perceptions that create the suffering. Why get involved with them? Distraction offers other good lessons: How is it that the mind moves from one object to another? What’s the process? Often you catch yourself in the act of thinking about something else, so you pull yourself back and swear, “I’m never going to move off … 
  6. A Genius about Your own Mind
     … Is there any potential in there for stress and suffering? They say that the difference between a genius and someone who’s simply intelligent is that an intelligent person can solve a problem that people have seen for a long time. But a genius is someone who sees and solves a problem that nobody else saw before. That’s the kind of person the … 
  7. Dedicating Merit
     … So all of a sudden, as she was meditating, she saw all these people who were suffering from having done bad kamma in one way or another. It was a good lesson in kamma for her. When she first started seeing these things, she didn’t want it to happen. She asked Ajaan Fuang how she could become insensitive to these things. But his … 
  8. Right Speech, Inside & Out
     … Right after right view explains the causes for suffering — the three kinds of craving: for sensuality, for becoming, for non-becoming — you’d think that right resolve would focus on abandoning those three kinds of craving. But it doesn’t. You resolve on getting rid of sensuality, but then also on getting rid of ill-will and harmfulness, two types of unskillful qualities, which … 
  9. Think
     … Okay, the insight was good, it’s part of the path, but the latching on to it is not part of the path, and it’s going to cause more suffering—which is why you have to be quick. Shooting far distances means seeing implications. There’s that passage in the Not-self Discourse where the Buddha talks about how you look at the … 
  10. Physical Pains & Painful Words
     … Where do you not see the distinction? Where have you glommed things together? The mind has a tendency to glue all kinds of things together, to make a big mass and a big mess of suffering. Can you use perceptions that cut through that glue? Because the pain, on its own, it is something separate. It is something different. It’s a different kind … 
  11. The Power of Choice
     … As the Buddha said, when you realize that everybody is working toward happiness, you can’t base your happiness on something that’s going to create suffering for other people, because they’re going to be working against your happiness. You may be able to fend them off a for a while, but eventually that kind of happiness will have to get destroyed. So … 
  12. Kamma & Rebirth
     … We do know when we feel suffering and we know when we feel relative ease, but that’s about as much as we know. As we grow up, there are people to explain things to us. This is where human beings have an advantage over animals. There’s nobody to explain anything to a dog or a cat about how to live. There’s … 
  13. What’s Relative, What’s Constant
     … They’re part of the teaching on the four noble truths, the part of the teaching that can help put an end to suffering. So, instead of seeing these teachings as weird artifacts of Asian culture that somehow got stuck in the Buddha’s teachings, realize that they’re something he thought about and he chose carefully as tools you can use. So learn … 
  14. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … The Buddha’s saying basically that we suffer because we do all of this wandering around, all of this fabrication, out of ignorance. But if you can start learning how to do it with knowledge, you can stop wandering. The knowledge required is not just being aware of doing it. You have to try to look at these things in terms of: Where is … 
  15. The Riddle Tree
     … The more natural the questions and the experience, the deeper the insight is going to go, and the more relevant it is to the actual suffering that’s going on in your mind. So this is why meditation is a process of exploration. You’re not trying to clone enlightenment. You’re trying to explore cause and effect as they reveal themselves in the … 
  16. Figuring Out Concentration
     … Because after all, if you don’t work on this problem now, when is it going to get solved?—the problem of how the mind wants happiness, acts on desires for happiness, but can still suffer from its own actions. You’re sabotaging your own desire for happiness. Why is that? What’s going on? Well, here’s a chance to find out. Get … 
  17. Cut, Cut, Cut
     … What are we doing right now that’s causing us suffering? You have to learn how to look right at your own actions, and that requires you to strip things down, make things as simple as possible. This is one of the reasons why the ajaans go into the forest, to go off to be on their own. They strip away as many issues … 
  18. Infinite Good Humor
     … The things that people want most are the very things that make them suffer most. For a long time, before their awakening, the arahants had been doing that sort of thing as well. This is why when they laugh at this tendency, it’s not a harsh laugh. They know what it’s like; they’ve been there themselves. But they were able to … 
  19. Technique & Attitude
     … It’s all simple, unadorned truth on the ways of the mind, and how the ways of the mind can be mastered so that you can get beyond suffering. These are good things to think about as a background to the meditation. Similarly with the recollection of the Dhamma. You just think about what kind of teaching this is. Recollection of the Sangha: the … 
  20. The Power of Present Karma
     … In the same way, you’re here because you’ve been suffering and you want to find a way out, so that you’re no longer trapped. Being convinced that there’s a way out opens the possibility. If you’re convinced that there’s no way out, then there’s nothing you’re going to do. You’re trapped. You’re trapping yourself … 
  21. Culture Shock
     … His totally overwhelming motivation was a desire for true happiness, a happiness with no drawbacks — in other words, a happiness that wasn’t going to cause suffering for other people either. It would have to be a happiness built on developing his inner resources, one that wouldn’t have to take anything away from anyone else. Instead of taking things, he lived off of … 
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