Search results for: "Suffering"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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