Search results for: "Suffering"
- Page 28
- The Same for Everyone… Ajaan Fuang’s comment was, “You have to think about that for quite a bit to make sense of what he said.” In other words, we have our differences, we have our peculiar ways of making ourselves suffer and making the people around us suffer, but when you come right down to it, the basic principles of why we’re suffering are all the …
- Asalha Puja – Completeness… Look at your intention in the present moment to see if it’s causing suffering or leading to the end of suffering. Everything comes down to the quality of the intention, the quality of the desire behind the intention. The cause of suffering, the Buddha says, comes down to three kinds of craving: sensual craving, craving to become this or that, or once you …
- Comfort Dhamma… That may be comforting, but it doesn’t really do much to end suffering. If can soothe your suffering for a little while. But actually, if you hold to beliefs like that, you end up doing a lot of things that are going to lead you to suffer even more. So just like comfort food, this kind of comfort Dhamma is not necessarily good …
- Passion for Dispassion… We want happiness, but we do things that lead to suffering, and it’s out of our ignorance. Whereas Ajaan Suwat would say, “It’s out of our stupidity.” We should be able to see that acts we’re doing are leading to suffering, but we don’t. We tend to blame the suffering on somebody else, somewhere else, something outside. Why is that …
- Wisdom for Dummies… When you dig deep down into why people suffer, you find that it’s because of craving. How can people stop suffering? By developing the path, which is primarily composed of good qualities of mind. So you realize the mind has to be trained. That’s another basic principle of wisdom: that true happiness comes from training the mind, because the mind is what …
- Bases for Success… The reason we suffer is because we’re stupid about certain things. We may be very wise, very well-educated in some areas, but we’re really stupid about the issue of suffering: exactly what the suffering is, why we’re suffering. So that’s the Buddha’s special contribution to the practice of concentration, the element of discrimination: concentration based on trying to …
- Nobody’s Servant… In other words, life isn’t just suffering. It also contains the possibility for the cessation of suffering, and there’s the path to the cessation of suffering. And the cessation of suffering is something unfabricated. Once you’ve found it, it’s not going to change on you. Even the three perceptions—the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, not-self— don’t apply to …
- Kamma & Rebirth—A Handful of Leaves… No matter how good they’ve been, no matter how bad they’ve been, you tell yourself you don’t want to see anybody suffer. Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t suffer. It means simply that you want to make sure your intentions around other people are something you can trust. At the same time, you have to be able to …
- Don’t Stop with Acceptance… It’s like that old slogan they had in Singapore when the AIDS epidemic was beginning to rage: “Other people can give you AIDS only if you let them give it to you.” In the same way, other people can make you suffer only if you let them make you suffer. Pain can make you suffer only if you let it make you suffer …
- Heedfulness & Confidence… They had been reading a little bit about what the Buddha taught about aging, illness, death, suffering, suffering, suffering, and they thought everybody who was a true Buddhist should be very depressed. And they concluded that the Thais and other Asians didn’t even know their own religion well. Of course, it was the other way around. It was the Western scholars who didn …
- The Power of Attention… You can see a good kamma seed, but if you focus on it in the wrong way, you can suffer from it. Or vice versa. There may be a bad kamma seed, but if you focus on it in the right way, you don’t have to suffer. It’s because of that possibility that we practice meditation. We’re learning how to focus …
- Lessons from the Breath… It’s something you consciously do with as much knowledge as possible, so that your mental and verbal fabrication don’t cause suffering. You understand that when you think, when you have feelings and perceptions, if you do that with ignorance, it’s going to cause suffering. But if you do it with knowledge, it goes in the other direction and helps form a …
- Metta Means Goodwill… The first is that if our happiness depends on somebody else’s suffering, it’s not going to last. They’ll do what they can to destroy it. The second reason is the plain quality of sympathy: If you see someone suffering, it’s painful. It’s hard to feel happy when you know that that happiness is causing suffering for others. But developing …
- What You Can’t Change, What You Can… If you see people who are suffering or people who are doing things that are going to lead to suffering and you want it to change, that’s compassion. You see yourself doing stupid things that lead to suffering, you want that to change, too: That’s compassion for yourself. Empathetic joy is when you see people who are happy or who are doing …
- Adult Education… Especially when you look at your life and ask yourself, “Have you learned how to not suffer? Have you learned how to act in ways that are skillful—in ways that don’t cause suffering to yourself, don’t cause any harm to anyone else?” That’s a skill, that’s an education that’s really worth mastering, and the time dedicated to that …
- Take an Interest… This is a very useful skill to have when your mind is telling you all kinds of things that could make you suffer. You realize the process leading to those thoughts that would induce suffering is not all that reliable, so why would you allow yourself to suffer from things you can’t trust? Why do you believe them? Watching the processes allows you …
- In the Elephant’s Footprint… There’s just suffering, the cause of suffering, actions that lead to the end of suffering. And there are duties. The duty with regard to suffering is to comprehend it. The duty with regard to its cause is to abandon it. The duty with regard to the cessation of suffering is to realize it, and you do that by developing the path. He was …
- Take Nothing for Granted… actions you’re doing in the present moment, some of which are leading to suffering, some of which are leading away from suffering. The Buddha gives you some pointers, but you’ve got to see for yourself: Exactly what do those pointers point to? What are you doing right now? Where is the craving right now that’s leading to suffering? Where’s the …
- The Four Noble Truths from Within… And he wants you to look at how you’re creating suffering out of these things right here. The word he uses for the essential part of suffering is *upadana, *which can mean clinging. It can also mean taking nourishment. You’re feeding off these things. You’re trying to feed off your feelings, your perceptions, your fabrications, your consciousness, your sense of the …
- Strength of Conviction… What’s causing suffering? What’s not? And as you focus on these things, you find that the mind gets greater and greater strength to make the right choices because you see very clearly that if you make the wrong choices, you suffer. Not only you, but people around you suffer as well. This way, regardless of what worlds of possibilities are presented by …
- Load next page...
