Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. You Should Heed These Shoulds
     … Comprehension of suffering simply becomes reflecting that suffering is like this, craving is like this, and so on down the line. But the Buddha never explained things that way. For him, the four noble truths were the basic teaching. The three perceptions found their role within the duties of those four noble truths. This is why, in the first sermon, he taught the four … 
  3. Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening
    This practice we are engaged in, the practice of trying to put an end to suffering, is a long-term process. And it has its ups and downs. Sometimes the downs get really down. So you need something to sustain you, to keep you going, even when things get difficult—either in terms of the state of your mind, the state of the body … 
  4. Training Heart & Mind
     … You realize there’s so much suffering in life. And who are you going to blame? You could blame the economy; you could blame the political system. But even in the ideal economy, the ideal political system, people would still suffer. There would still be suffering in your heart and mind. That’s what we want to work on: the unnecessary suffering that the … 
  5. Your True Responsibility
     … They deal with suffering and the end of suffering. What do you do to bring about the end of suffering? In other words, how do you arrange the issues in your mind skillfully so that they no longer lead to suffering? Even the Buddha’s teaching on causality can be compared to modern theories about learning. He tells precisely why it is that people … 
  6. Big Desire, Detailed Focus
     … And it’s true that we have to learn dispassion for the things that cause suffering and for the clinging that is suffering itself. But we’ve got to have some passion for the path. We’ve got to have some desire. All things, the Buddha said, are rooted in desire, and that includes the path. When we get to the end, we put … 
  7. Insight into Pain
     … The Buddha’s not going to take the pain away for you, but he does tell you what you can do to overcome the suffering. In particular, he talks about two kinds of pain, two kinds of suffering. There’s the pain in the three characteristics and there’s the pain or suffering in the four noble truths. The pain in the three characteristics … 
  8. Purity Comes Through Discernment
    We suffer for a reason, but it’s not just one reason. There are lots of different kinds of reasons. There’s one word that covers them all—craving—but there are lots of different cravings in the mind. Which means that we need lots of different tools to use against those cravings. The Buddha classified them two broad areas. He said some forms … 
  9. Metta Can Hurt
     … May all those who are suffering be free from their suffering. May all those who are happy or doing good things, may they continue to be happy. May, may, may. But you look at the world. Not everybody is happy. A lot of people are suffering or doing things that are going to cause suffering both for other people now and for themselves on … 
  10. Mind in & of Itself
     … realizing that if the mind is suffering, even though there may be bad things happening outside, the suffering is coming from within—you can’t keep blaming other people for your suffering. That’s right view. Right view tells you that if you want to look at the reasons for your suffering, you have to look inside and you have to step out of … 
  11. Dhamma Books & the Actuality
     … We’re here to see how the mind creates suffering for itself and what it can do to alleviate that suffering and ultimately put it to an end. There are specific movements in the mind that are actually causing specific instances of suffering. As we’re working here on concentration, we’re learning to take those movements and direct them in another direction, make … 
  12. Brahmaviharas on the Path
     … We see that there’s suffering that comes from sensuality. There’s suffering that comes from thoughts of ill will, suffering that comes from harmfulness, and we want to develop qualities of mind that don’t allow these things to take over. The brahmaviharas are precisely those qualities. Goodwill counteracts ill will. Compassion counteracts harmfulness. And there’s a passage where the Buddha says … 
  13. Good at Thinking
     … That’s, “Why are you suffering? Why is there suffering?” Wisdom, the Buddha says, comes from learning to ask the question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” Now, this may seem selfish, focusing on your own happiness, but true happiness, long-term happiness, can’t rely on the suffering of other people. If it did, they … 
  14. Determined to Practice
     … Where is the suffering here? What’s causing it? How can it be put to an end? When you recognize where there’s suffering, you realize that there’s a duty to be done: to try to comprehend it. This is not our normal reaction to suffering. Our normal reaction is to run away or to push it away. But if you run away … 
  15. The Missing Truth
    The Buddha says that when we experience pain, stress, suffering, the mind has two reactions. One is bewilderment. We don’t understand how the suffering has come. The second is a search: “Is there anyone out there who knows a way or two to put an end to the suffering?” This means that we’re looking for three kinds of truth. We’re looking … 
  16. Dhamma is Timeless
     … The cause of suffering, the cause of stress, is something that should be abandoned; the path is something that should be developed. So the four truths take those two principles of skillful and unskillful qualities, and divide them up into cause and effect. The cause of suffering is something you abandon, the suffering itself is something you want to comprehend. The path is something … 
  17. Stop Weaving
    That dog is suffering, so it wants to spread its suffering around. That’s the usual response of living beings. Simply the fact of having a body, having feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness, clinging to these things, we suffer. Carrying these things around as a burden, we suffer. It’s because we weigh ourselves down that we feel overburdened. When you’re overburdened, the … 
  18. The Heightened Mind
     … After all, we’re here to solve the problem of suffering which is the big problem in life, and suffering is not out there in the world.* *The suffering is inside the heart, inside the mind in a part of your awareness that nobody else can reach. No one else can sense your suffering. No one else can experience it directly. You can focus … 
  19. Sources of Lasting Happiness
     … They keep piling on more and more suffering. When the Buddha talked about suffering as his first noble truth, this is what he was focusing on: the suffering we create for ourselves unnecessarily. He never said life is suffering. He simply said there is suffering in life in the way we cling. And clinging comes from where? It comes from actions of the mind … 
  20. Battling Negativity
    The work of looking into the mind, ferreting out the causes of suffering and figuring out how to put an end to them, is very delicate work, very precise work. Which is why you have to get the mind very still in order to do it. It’s like threading a needle. You hold your breath, get the rest of the body still, and … 
  21. Doubting the Buddha
    The Buddha said several times that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering, or stress and the end of stress. But people tend not to believe him. They want him to teach other things as well. If you look at the history of Buddhist thought, you see people taking his teachings and squeezing them to answer all kinds of questions that … 
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