Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Freedom, Conditioned & Not
     … And of course the issue of suffering places a lot of dualities on you right here and now. Suffering is different from not suffering; the cause of suffering is different from the cause of not suffering. Unless you’re totally dead, you’re going to prefer not suffering. So the fact of suffering forces dualities on us. And as the Buddha points out, it … 
  3. The Treasure of Equanimity
     … Politicians can say that they feel your suffering, but that’s politicians. They’ll say anything. You know that your suffering is your suffering. Other people can sympathize with it and give you condolences and try to do the best they can, but they can’t come in and take your suffering away. It’s like a child, crying uncontrollably. You hold the child … 
  4. Give of Yourself
     … After all, it is your suffering you’re dealing with—the actions you’re doing that are causing that suffering, and the actions you could do to put an end to suffering. How sincerely do you want to put an end to suffering? Here again we come to that issue of how you make yourself worthy of the Dhamma. The Dhamma isn’t something … 
  5. The Perception of Inconstancy
     … When you cling to things that change, you want them to be a certain way—but then they change into something else, so there’s going to be suffering. You want to comprehend that, that that’s where the suffering lies. It’s not so much in the fact that things change. Suffering lies in the fact that you’re clinging. So you try … 
  6. Food for Consciousness
     … But not only that, we’re also experiencing the causes of that pain and suffering from within, too. And even more important, we can manipulate them, we can do something about them from within so as to put an end to suffering. That’s the important part of his teachings. We’re not trying to solve our sufferings by changing the world outside. And … 
  7. Good & Independent
     … At the same time, when the mind settles down like this, it’s a lot easier for it to discern what’s actually going on—to see why it’s causing suffering. When blatant suffering comes up, you can see it really clearly. But there are subtle sufferings as well, and the subtle sufferings have subtle causes, which is why you have to get … 
  8. In Touch with Your Fabrications
    Modern psychology tells us that we’re suffering because we’re not in touch with our feelings. The Dhamma tells us that we’re suffering because we’re not in touch with how we create feelings. “Feelings,” here, of course, are emotions. They’re a kind of saṅkhāra, or fabrication, and there are basically three: bodily, verbal, and mental. Bodily is how you breathe … 
  9. Games the Mind Plays
     … You’re on this side where there’s suffering. On the other side is total freedom from suffering. You want to get over to the other side. When the image is simple and clear like that, it seems like this would just be a simple thing. You’re suffering. You don’t want to suffer. You get across the river. You follow the path … 
  10. Not What You Are, What You Do
     … To begin with, when the Buddha talks about the causes of suffering, he doesn’t trace it back to what you are. He doesn’t say you suffer because you’re basically bad, or because you’re basically good but somehow have been socially conditioned to forget your true inner goodness. He comes back instead to what you do. That right there is a … 
  11. Accepting the Way Things Function
     … If you catch yourself feeling ill will to the point where you actually want to harm somebody, you’ve got to stop and think: “This person is suffering already. We’re all suffering already. And you want to add more suffering to yourself by making that other person suffer more?” That’s a useful way of thinking. At the very least, it reminds you … 
  12. A Thread Out of the Maze
     … the teaching on suffering, the cause of suffering, the possibility of an end to suffering, and what you can do to put an end to suffering. If your suffering weren’t dependent on your actions, there’d be nothing you could do to stop it. It’s because it is dependent on your actions: That’s why the path to the end of suffering … 
  13. The Committee of the Mind
     … But it’s good to keep in mind that the Buddha promises that there is such a thing as the end of suffering. There was one Dhamma teacher I heard one time saying, “I don’t know about the end of suffering, but I’ve learned that suffering is manageable.” She called that the third-and-a-half noble truth, which is rating it … 
  14. The Dhamma Points Inside
     … An animal cries—you reflect on suffering. So there are Dhamma lessons all around.” The monk from Bangkok, chastened, said, “Well, obviously you know how to listen.” So as a meditator, you want to learn how to listen to the Dhamma, too. You can ask yourself, “What in this Dhamma talk that I’m listening to applies to my problem of suffering?” When you … 
  15. Endurance & Contentment
     … One of the most harmful mental fabrications to focus on is how you’re suffering under some condition that other people are not suffering under and thinking that it’s not right. But then again, you don’t know other people’s states of mind. They may be free in some ways that you’re not free, but suffering under other burdens that you … 
  16. Self Esteem
     … So it’s more a question of your discernment in seeing when it’s time to give up a sense of self esteem that’s based on a rickety foundation, one that constantly has to be shored up to the point where people suffer. Most people never learn. They suffer horribly just because they want to retain a little scrap of self respect here … 
  17. The Blood You’ve Shed
     … From his second knowledge, he focused in on the present moment, looking to see what his mind was doing at that moment that was causing stress and suffering, and what intentions and views he could develop to put an end to that stress and suffering. He saw that the suffering came from craving and clinging, so he focused his intentions on doing everything he … 
  18. Breaking the Arrows
     … In other words, whatever the story was, it was going to end in suffering. His question was: Is there something you can do so that you can experience aging, illness, death, and separation and not suffer? That was why he went off into the forest to really look into his mind, because he realized the doing here would primarily be a mental doing: looking … 
  19. Ironclad Technique vs. No Technique
     … And you can begin to see what’s actually causing suffering right now. You can begin to see basically what you’re doing, what’s causing suffering, and what’s not causing suffering. You get an inkling of cause and effect, which you don’t get if you’re told simply to follow a technique and not to pass any judgment on it, just … 
  20. Justice vs. Skillfulness
     … Instead of running around trying to right all the sufferings caused by the injustices of the world or the structure of society, he focused on one type of suffering: the suffering we each cause ourselves, through our own craving, through our own clinging, through our own ignorance. When we put an end to that suffering, we don’t suffer from anything outside at all … 
  21. Respect for What’s Noble
     … When the Buddha calls this the “noble truth of suffering,” he’s not saying that suffering itself is noble. What’s noble lies in adopting his perspective on suffering, because it requires that you take responsibility for your own sufferings. You’re willing to step back from your urges, from your moods, from your likes and dislikes—and that’s a noble act in … 
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