Search results for: "Suffering"
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- All for the Sake of Freedom… Why is that? Because the mind, when it’s untrained, can cause a lot of suffering. There’s a passage where the Buddha says that we gain our conviction in the path from the fact of suffering. He goes through the different stages in the series of dependent co-arising, from ignorance all the way up to suffering and stress. And then he moves …
- A Sense of Duty… In terms of the four noble truths, suffering should be comprehended—in other words, you should see that suffering is in the clinging to the aggregates. That takes a lot of effort to comprehend because we tend to see suffering in other places. But this, the Buddha said, is where the real suffering is. So you want to comprehend that. How do you cling …
- Common Sense… Yet so much of the mind is filled with make-believe and so much of that make-believe causes suffering. And then we pretend that the suffering isn’t there, which just compounds the problem. So learn to look at everything in the mind in terms of cause and effect—and particularly in terms of which causes lead to suffering and which ones don …
- Fixing the Present… If you’re suffering, well, what is the suffering? And what’s the cause? What arises together with the suffering and falls away when the suffering falls away? That’s something you can watch right here, right now, and you can see it more and more clearly as you develop factors of the path. So all this falls under the four noble truths that …
- Goodwill & Kamma… And there’s no sense of people “deserving” to suffer. There’s a common view that each of us has a single karmic account, and what we see right now is the running balance. That’s a very simplistic idea. It leads people to think that if you see somebody suffering now they must deserve to be suffering, so you leave them—which is …
- A Mind Bigger than Pain… If you’ve developed thoughts of goodwill, then you think about all those beings out there who are suffering. You’re not the only one who’s suffering right now. There’s a lot of suffering going around all over the world. You want to have compassion for all those beings who are suffering. As for the beings who are happy or enjoying good …
- Safety All Around… Otherwise, you’re going to suffer from these things. The Buddha puts a little question mark into your likes and dislikes: The things that you hold on to, the things that you’re feeding on: Do you realize that those are where your suffering is? Your thirst for those things, that’s what’s causing the suffering. The suffering isn’t caused by what …
- Skillful Selfing… You’re already creating suffering through your actions, and the purpose of the practice is to change your actions so that you can stop creating suffering. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha was so insistent on the importance of his teachings on kamma. He wasn’t the sort of person who would go out and pick fights with other people, but …
- Rebirth is Relevant… As he said, birth, rebirth, is one of the prime instances of suffering. And because he taught the end of suffering, an important part of his teaching had to deal with how to put an end to rebirth. Now, because rebirth is an action, it’s something that at the very least you should learn to do skillfully. How do you develop the skill …
- Admirable Friendship… Because once the mind is not creating unnecessary suffering or disturbances for itself, it’s not going to suffer at all. The Buddha discovered that all suffering is unnecessary. Pain is part of having a human body, physical pain, but mental suffering is not necessary. We’re creating it. Our old habitual ways of feeding—feeding off our thoughts, feeding off our opinions, feeding …
- Your Judgments Matter… As the Buddha points out there are things you do that cause suffering, and things you can do that can put an end to suffering. The other feature they have in common is that they deal with actions. Each of them has its shoulds. Skillful actions should be developed. Unskillful actions should be abandoned. Suffering should be comprehended. Its origination should be abandoned. The …
- The Mind Undefined… One of the reasons why we meditate is to strengthen the mind so that it is able to push further, to the point where it has a chance to ask that big question, “Is it possible to put an end to suffering, totally?” Here again, the Buddha didn’t define what suffering is. He simply gave examples. He boiled things down to five clinging …
- Strength from Within… The craving that leads to suffering is specifically three kinds—for sensuality, for becoming, and for non-becoming—but the desire to do well on the path is not part of the cause of suffering. It’s part of the path. So you try to nurture that desire, give rise to it, and nourish to keep it strong. Again, one of the customs of …
- Hold a Mirror to Your Mind… The big issue is the issue of suffering. The solution to it requires getting very clear about what you’re doing right now, and particularly what you’re doing that’s contributing to suffering, what you might do to put an end to that suffering. This is one of the reasons why we focus our attention on the present moment in our meditation. There …
- Stay Principled… So instead, the Buddha has you focus on the specific places where you’re causing suffering and then work back from the suffering to the cause. One of the huge areas in our lives is our relationships with other people: How do you cause suffering around that, and how can you use the teachings to apply to solve that problem? First off, of course …
- Basic Wisdom… Underlying that is the conviction, and heedfulness, based the motivation by which you tell yourself you really would rather not suffer. You really would like to see the end of suffering. This is how our practice of generosity, virtue, and meditation leads to wisdom and discernment. And it’s how the wisdom and discernment lead to the end of suffering. They’re embodied in …
- You’ll Wish You’d Meditated More… And this discernment is what’s going to protect you, because the biggest thing you need to protect yourself from is the way the mind creates suffering out of whatever comes up. If we’re creating suffering out of relatively pleasant circumstances right now, imagine what the mind is going to do when the body starts to break down. So, on the one hand …
- Abandoning Effluents (1)… Where is the suffering? What is the suffering? What’s the best way to relate to that? What’s causing the suffering? What’s the best way to relate to that? What actions can lead to the end of suffering? What’s the best way to relate to those? That line of thinking, even though it’s not knowledge yet, at least is conviction …
- Genuine Happiness… But to find that happiness, to develop the path to that happiness, we have to understand suffering. That means we have to understand what our minds are doing right now to create suffering, because that’s the suffering that weighs the mind down. The pains that come in from outside, the misfortunes out there in the world: They don’t have to make us …
- Skills to Make a Difference… You take that to heart. **When you fire shots in rapid succession, you see where the mind is suffering and where it’s causing itself suffering. In other words, you actually see the act of clinging, the act of craving, and how they’re connected. ** To pierce great masses is to pierce the mass of the ignorance, avijjā.** It’s interesting that the Buddha …
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