Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"

  1. Page 21
  2. Fighting off Ignorance
     … It’s more like the gradually developing knowledge that comes with a gradually developing skill, because each of the four noble truths has a skill, a task appropriate to it. You try to comprehend where there’s stress, where there’s suffering, so you can see the cause. You come to see that the cause is your craving, which is really unnecessary. When you … 
  3. Free Sources of Energy
     … If you bring some knowledge to it—in other words, you start thinking in terms of the four noble truths—you see that you’re suffering not because of the chores outside or the fact that you’re tired. You’re suffering because of craving and clinging. That puts a different cast on things. And if you can apply those categories to your situation … 
  4. A Passion for the Path
    Sometimes the question comes up that when the Buddha listed the four noble truths why did he list the cessation of suffering before the path to the cessation of suffering? The answer is in the third noble truth. He’s not simply stating the fact that there’s a cessation. He’s also stating a principle. The cessation comes when you develop dispassion for … 
  5. Feeding the Mind
     … Four is the four noble truths, five is the five clinging-aggregates, and so on up through ten. The most interesting question, though, is, “What’s one?” Some teachers might answer that there’s the oneness of the world, or the oneness of the underlying principle of all things. But the Buddha’s answer was something totally different. “What’s one” is “All living … 
  6. Delight in Stillness
     … You don’t have to look elsewhere, anywhere far away for the suffering of the four noble truths. Right there, where the mind is disturbing itself, that’s suffering. You want to figure out why: What’s the craving that’s getting in the way? What are you clinging to? So do your best to get the mind to settle down. Find the greatest … 
  7. Abusing Pleasure & Pain
     … That’s stress and pain in the four noble truths. And that’s not necessary. In Ajaan Lee’s phrase, the pains in the body are natural pains. The pains caused by craving are unnatural. We create them—and yet we don’t have to. That’s what you need to learn how to see. Why do you create these kinds of pains? Because … 
  8. The Uses of Pleasure
     … Pain, of course, you use as a topic of your analysis so you that can see the four noble truths. As you use pain, you have to be learn how to use pleasure so that you have a good place to back off when dealing with the pain gets too much. You’ve got the pleasure to depend on. And relating to the pleasure … 
  9. Where You Set Your Heart
     … In the four noble truths, the first two truths describe the way things are. The third and the fourth, though, describe the way things can be if you set your heart on them. It’s up to you to take those truths and make them true, make them realities in your heart. ** This is why the teachings on karma are so basic to the … 
  10. A Multilingual Mind
     … What is the cause, what is the effect? Which causes are better than other causes? Which effects are better than other effects? This is why the Buddha’s most important teachings are the four noble truths, because they point to cause and effect: skillful cause and unskillful cause, desirable effect and undesirable effect. Simple, very basic, basic terms: pleasure, pain, ease and stress, happiness … 
  11. The Need for Right View
     … The second level is to look at things in terms of the four noble truths. As you’re sitting here, what are you doing? It’s not the case that you just stop doing and are simply being. Being, again, is a type of activity. As the Buddha points out, becoming comes from certain choices. So what you want to choose is to focus … 
  12. The Walls of Ignorance
     … We tend to think of ignorance, or avijja, in very abstract terms — not knowing the four noble truths, not knowing dependent co-arising, not knowing the Deathless — but you can’t chip away at those forms of ignorance until you’ve chipped away at the more blatant, immediate ones: the mind’s habit of disassociating, of leaving gaps in its inner conversation. Say you … 
  13. Learn from the Ants
     … Shooting in quick succession means seeing things in terms of the four noble truths—being very quick to see, when something comes up in the mind, what’s the suffering? What’s the craving? Which mental states are part of the path? Piercing great masses is piercing ignorance. So, the work gets subtler. But there are still things you have to overcome, still battles … 
  14. A Positive-Sum Game
     … That’s the beginning of the four noble truths right there. So this is a positive-sum game. If you learn to live life playing this game rather than getting involved in other games, everyone comes out ahead.
  15. The Right Focal Length
     … He made an interesting observation that the problems stemmed from the fact that a lot of the people in the community didn’t take the four noble truths seriously. What he meant, of course, was that they kept complaining about things outside, blaming their sufferings on conditions outside, and never taking seriously the idea that maybe their suffering was actually coming from within, and … 
  16. Goodwill as a Guardian
     … When the Buddha saw that his listeners could acknowledge these drawbacks, then he’d teach them the four noble truths. Those truths are counterintuitive in a lot of ways. But once he had prepared you to accept these truths, you’d be inclined to follow the duties with regard to them. Many times, as he would teach people these truths, they would have their … 
  17. Wise Endurance
     … The same when you apply the teachings of the four noble truths: Being with what is unpleasant, being with what is unloved, is one of the examples of suffering listed in the first noble truth. But remember: All the forms of suffering that are listed there boil down to the five clinging-aggregates: clinging to form, feeling, perception, thought fabrications, or consciousness. In particular … 
  18. Sensitivity & Skill
     … And as you master this as a skill, you start adopting the four noble truths because they’re a way of looking at things directly related to the approach of someone who wants to master a skill. Where are things not going well? What’s causing it? How can you attack the cause? And what do you have to do to attack the cause … 
  19. Why Limit Yourself?
     … Why would you want not to believe in these things? Why would you not want to believe in the four noble truths that suffering is clinging, it’s caused by a craving, it can be ended by ending the craving, and there is a path of practice to follow? This is a set of beliefs that offers hope. If you don’t want to … 
  20. How to Be Self-Centered
     … After all, that’s the Buddha’s analysis in the four noble truths. We suffer not because of what other people do, and the path to the end of suffering doesn’t lie in straightening other people out. We suffer from what we’re doing, and the path lies in straightening out ourselves. So that’s where our focus has to be. That’s … 
  21. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … When you look more carefully at the Buddha’s teaching, you realize that, in the four noble truths, he divides desire into two types: There are the three types of craving under the second noble truth; and then there’s the desire that you generate under the factor of right effort in the path, the fourth noble truth: You generate desire to abandon unskillful … 
  22. Load next page...