Search results for: "Suffering"

  1. Page 144
  2. Staying, Moving, & Neither
     … This is why the Buddha said, in the dimension where suffering ends, there is no coming, there is no going, and no staying in place. When that deva asked him how he crossed the stream, he said he crossed by neither moving forward nor staying in place. He left it at that and didn’t explain it because he wanted the deva to realize … 
  3. The Power of Intention
     … When you bring knowledge to these processes, they can form the path—the path to the end of suffering; the path to the deathless; the path to things that lie beyond intention. By training your intentions, you can take yourself there. Remember that the Buddha said that intention is basically karma, and karma is basically intention. Ultimately, we’re trying to master the karma … 
  4. The Desire for Things to Be Different
     … One of the definitions of suffering is not getting what you want: in other words, being born and not wanting to die. You can’t get that simply by wishing. But there is a path—the path of virtue, the path of concentration, the path of discernment—that will get you where you want to go. It’ll take you to a different place … 
  5. Nuclear Thinking
     … It can weigh us down with all kinds of suffering, all kinds of stress when the mind goes overboard in its thinking. The skill in meditation is learning how to think when you want to, how not to think when you don’t. It’s not a process of putting yourself into a totally blank state where no thinking is ever possible. At the … 
  6. All Three Functions of Mindfulness
     … If you identify too strongly with a particular role, you’re going to suffer when you no longer can play that role. So look for the allure, and then look at it in terms of that master narrative. Is going for this particular defilement really worth it in terms of its consequences? Does it make sense in terms of that larger narrative? This is … 
  7. Desires Have Their Reasons
     … That’s the cause of suffering. Ajaan Lee identifies these outflows with the effluents. There’s a desire that arises in the mind and then goes flowing out to meet up with an object. And then the mind changes, based on the desires it follows. The world around it changes as well. You can see, for instance, that if someone gambles a little bit … 
  8. Protection
     … Yet even then, he knows when to hold it back, because those other leaves would not be helpful in putting an end to suffering. So, you may know the truth, your opinions may be true, but how true are they compared to the truth of the Buddha? He knew when to hold things back. It’s good for us to know when to hold … 
  9. Reflect on What You’re Doing
     … You want to look at what you’re doing—because ultimately, as you find out, what you’re doing is causing suffering and you want to learn how to stop. Largely, the practice is about getting more sensitive to what you’re doing. In the beginning, the Buddha told Rahula, “Before you act, reflect first on the intention. This act that you want to … 
  10. Protection Through Mindfulness Practice
     … We’re shaping our experience, so we need guidance as to what ways will provide us with happiness in the long term and help us avoid suffering in the long term. The main danger in life is our own lack of knowledge in this area—or even worse, believing that our actions don’t matter or have no results. That’s really dangerous—a … 
  11. The Ennobling Path
     … Compunction is the ability to foresee a dangerous or to foresee an undesirable result of an action and say, “I just don’t want to go there.” This quality is based on goodwill for yourself, realizing that the little bit of pleasure that comes from an unskillful impulse now is not really worth all the danger, all the sorrow and suffering, that will come … 
  12. Generating Desire
     … said, “Oh, the second skill is an even more amazing one.” And the Buddha replied, “Even more amazing than that is the skill of being able to pierce the truths of suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation.” In other words, he reminded Ananda that this path requires a great deal of precision and skill. When you can accomplish it … 
  13. Mental Stirrings
     … You end up creating suffering for yourself, weighing yourself down. And when you weigh yourself down, you weigh down other people around you as well. The question is, how do you see these things? Simply by trying to stay with the breath as much as possible, being as quick as possible to drop a thought as soon as you see that you’ve been … 
  14. Blessings
     … You try to comprehend suffering, abandon its cause, and realize its cessation by developing the path. So those are our duties right now. We’re focusing on the breath, we’re trying to develop right mindfulness, right effort and right concentration—all of that based on right view. These are all qualities of the path, factors of the path that we want to develop … 
  15. The Karma of Pain
     … And all the Buddha’s teachings—on the four noble truths, on the aggregates and particularly the teaching on past and present karma, skillful and unskillful karma—are there to help you understand what you’re doing so that you can do it well—and do it so well that you reach the point where you no longer cause yourself any suffering. There’ll … 
  16. The Challenge of Faith
     … What the Buddha’s doing is taking that paradox and saying, “Let’s explore and see how far it can take us in the pursuit of true happiness, the pursuit for finding an end to suffering.” Our laboratory is right here in our body, our speech, and our mind, particularly as we get to know our intentions better and better. This is one of … 
  17. Shifting Your Paradigm
     … Then the labels turn around and bite us, make us suffer, make us do things that we know we shouldn’t be doing. So the question comes: How can we change the filing system? How can we change our pattern of looking at things, and make what’s called a paradigm shift? There are two ways. One, you can think your way into a … 
  18. Respect for Happiness
     … If you suffer from stress diseases, working with the breath can work through that stress and dissolve it away so that physically you’re healthier, and mentally you have a home. Wherever you are, you’re at home. So take some time to make this house into a home. Make the body comfortable right now. Think of the breath not just as air going … 
  19. Working at Home
     … The four noble truths are a problem-solving approach, focused on the problem of stress and suffering as a whole, and offering a solution to the problem. As you first start applying this approach to the obvious issues in your life, you learn to develop maturity around the application of this teaching. The work then gets more and more subtle, to the point where … 
  20. Ingenuity
     … The fourth quality that makes you a good friend to yourself is to be discerning, seeing which actions lead to suffering, which actions lead away. The Buddha calls this “penetrative discernment of arising and passing away.” It doesn’t mean you just simply watch things coming and going. For the discernment to be penetrative, you have to see that when some things come, they … 
  21. Conviction & Confidence
     … That right there really merits conviction because it reminds us that it is possible through human effort to put an end to suffering. It is possible through human effort to cleanse the mind. Sometimes you hear the idea that the ego is so corrupt that anything it tries to do is going to be corrupted as well. That idea closes off all the doors … 
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