Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Subduing Greed & Distress… The mind has a strange tendency to want to stay in areas where it’s familiar even though they involve suffering. The fact that the mind is familiar with these old ways of acting tend to make it unwilling to move into something new because the new areas are new. They require new skills, and there’s a different sense of you. After a …
- Taking Responsibility… So reflect on the topic of appropriate attention, this ability to ask questions that give you insight into why there is suffering and how it can be stopped. You’ve got your laboratory right here: the body and the mind. These things have been showing their truths for who knows how many lifetimes, but you haven’t noticed. If you learn to observe, the …
- Mindfulness Defined… As the Buddha says, there are times when affection is a cause for suffering, so you have to watch out. Sometimes mindfulness is defined as appreciating the moment for whatever pleasure it can offer. In the Buddha’s vocabulary, that’s contentment. Contentment is useful in areas where you’re experiencing physical difficulties, but it’s not always useful in the area of the …
- Concentration & Insight… So many times we do things that lead to stress and suffering and harm, and yet we wonder, “Why?” Well, it’s because we don’t know what we’re doing. But when the mind is centered and still like this, you can see more clearly what’s coming up in the mind—what intentions are beginning to form—and you can decide whether …
- The Limits of Old Kamma… That’s something we all suffer from every day, every day. This is why we have the reflection on the four requisites. If we didn’t have food, clothing, shelter, and medicine, the body would die. We’re born with these gaping needs. But at the same time, you can learn how to use the body as a basis for the practice. You can …
- More than a Sliver of Mindfulness… As the Buddha said, we suffer because we fabricate things in ignorance, but we can bring knowledge to the process of fabrication. Then it becomes part of the path. And it’s sustained by developing a sense of well-being that you can then learn how to carry through the day. For example, as you’re doing walking meditation, remember: You’re trying to …
- Mindfulness of Death… Your daily habits, your meditative skills—these are the things that will determine whether you suffer or not. This way, you’re prepared emotionally, but you’re also prepared in terms of the skills you’ll have to bring to bear. When you approach mindfulness of death from this perspective, then you’re going to get the most out of it. So as the …
- Help Others, Help Your Mind… They include the principle that skillful actions should be developed, and unskillful actions should be abandoned, and then the four noble truths, which are basically the application of that first principle to the problem of suffering. The discernment comes in seeing what’s skillful and what’s not, in your own mind. When you follow certain patterns of thinking, where do they lead? The …
- Paying Off Your Debts… realizing that whatever suffering there is in life comes from within, from your own actions, particularly from actions of the mind. But you have the freedom to change, the freedom to learn from your actions. There’s a passage where the Buddha says that the mind is luminous and it’s defiled by passing defilements. The common image is the sun, with clouds blocking …
- A Leap of the Heart… You’ve been feeding on things, the feeding is suffering, and now you’ve seen enough so that you don’t want anymore. When you want to stop feeding, that’s disenchantment. And from there, the dispassion comes in. The dispassion then undercuts any motive for continuing to fabricate whatever you used to take as food. So this is the process. Look for the …
- Standing Outside Your Thoughts… But then you find yourself falling into the present, this gift that you’ve given to yourself, and sometimes that can involve a lot of suffering because your thoughts can take you in all kinds of places. As we meditate, we’re trying to get some control over this process. There’s the belief that meditation involves no thinking at all, which is not …
- Observant & Ingenious… Remember your major duties—to comprehend suffering, abandon the cause, realize its cessation by developing the path—and then follow those duties by being observant, by being ingenious. That’s how awakening becomes your own, because you’ve developed the powers of your own mind.
- Dhamma Medicine… One is the question, “What when I do it will lead to my long-term harm? What when I do it will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” In other words, start by seeing the connection between your actions and the happiness and well-being you’re going to experience, or the harm and misery, the suffering you’re going to experience …
- Three Levels of Evaluation… Hakuin, the famous Zen monk, talks about suffering from Zen sickness. Basically it was breath energy getting stuck in his head. To counteract it, he’d visualize a ball of butter on the top of his head melting down over the body. That was how he brought the energy back down. You might also think of the breath energy coming in and out the …
- The Power of Truth… what you’re doing that’s causing stress, what you can learn how to stop doing that’s causing stress, and seeing the state of the end of stress, the end of suffering that results. We’re not here trying to clone someone else’s insights. We’re following a path, and this is the path of looking for the stress, learning to comprehend …
- The Politics of Arising & Passing Away… This is why the assumption of rebirth is such an essential part of the practice, for it helps you see that these little innocent movements of the mind, these very natural-seeming arisings and passings away that look pretty innocuous in the present moment, have a long-term potential for suffering. And it’s not natural that you let go. I don’t know …
- The Buddha’s Shoulds… Jhana on its own doesn’t lead to the end of suffering. There are a lot of passages describing people who attain different levels of jhana and are able to maintain them, but if they don’t go beyond that, they end up getting reborn in the various Brahma worlds after they die. Then when they fall from there, who knows where they’re …
- Fabricating the Present… That’s how this strange practice of just focusing on your breath can lead you to the end of suffering. You reach the point where you can confirm for yourself that what the Buddha taught about there being a deathless element is really true. And that, the Buddha said, is even better than sole dominion over the entire Earth. So check and see if …
- Noble Treasures… That can lead to pain and suffering beyond death, and it can last for many lifetimes. What are you best protections against doing unskillful things? There’s a list of qualities that the Buddha calls the seven noble treasures, qualities of mind that you develop, that you can really depend on in the future—that will protect you from doing the things that would …
- All-around Eye… You keep it clean; you keep it neat; but you focus your discontent on the fact that there’s still suffering in the mind. As the Buddha said, the secret to his awakening was that he didn’t allow himself to rest content with skillful qualities. Even though he had developed powers of jhana, he didn’t stay there. He didn’t stay right …
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