Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"
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- Patient & Inquisitive… What does he mean? And why would that be suffering? He sets out the four noble truths not simply as a nice thing to think about. He’s challenging you. Each one of the truths is a challenge. Your cravings are making you suffer. Yet we think that our cravings are what enable us to find happiness. He says it is possible to put …
- Comfortable as an Outsider… That’s what the message of the four noble truths is all about. It’s not that we suffer from sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations. We suffer because of the commentary we apply to these things. And a lot of meditation is learning to talk to yourself in new ways. In fact, the whole practice is about talking to yourself in new …
- The Right to Repair Your Mind… else has to do this for you. But he’s saying that you’ve got the wherewithal within yourself to solve the mind’s problems, particularly the problem of suffering. The four noble truths are his repair manual. They’re things you can find within yourself. They’re right here, right now—all four truths. And the reason we haven’t seen them is …
- Hold a Mirror to Your Mind… it give insight into the pattern of action in shaping the world, but also focused in on, “What am I doing that’s causing suffering?” That’s the beginning of the four noble truths. It’s not just actions from the past, it’s actions in the present moment that really matter. Seeing that got him to the third knowledge, and that was the …
- Streams of Anger… This is what the dynamic of the four noble truths is all about—wherever there’s suffering, turn around and look inside. Things outside may really be bad, but the suffering is not caused by the things outside. Look at dependent co-arising: Suffering doesn’t begin with unpleasant sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. Those come in the middle of the sequence. It …
- Cause & Effect… Because when the Buddha talks about the four noble truths, he’s not talking about something abstract and far away. It’s something extremely personal: the fact that our unskillful desires give rise to suffering; skillful desires can bring an end to suffering. Our desires are about as intimate a part of ourselves as you can imagine. Yet we often don’t examine them …
- Alone & Together… ask yourself: To what extent are they true, and to what extent is the opposite true? After all, there are only a few things that are true across the board: the four noble truths, the duties of those truths, and the basic principle that unskillful qualities should be abandoned and skillful ones should be developed. Everything else has its time and place. Even the …
- Strengthening Your Goodness… In other words, you’ve got your own inner set of duties, what the Buddha sets out in the four noble truths: to comprehend the way the mind creates suffering for itself, to abandon the cause, to realize the cessation of suffering by developing the path. It may seem a little disconcerting that here are even more duties for you, but these are the …
- A Pleasure Not to Be Feared… In the chant just now, the four noble truths are about suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. The focus seems to be on suffering, but notice that the truths don’t just stick with suffering. They’re also about how to find an end to it. And the end of suffering is true happiness. So those four noble truths …
- Study & Practice… That’s what the four noble truths are all about. You have to learn to distinguish between stress and suffering on the one hand, and its cause on the other. Then there’s the path, which does involve some stress and suffering. After all, it’s made out of aggregates, which are subject to conditions. But you have to use them, so you have …
- Basic Wisdom… They’re embodied in the four noble truths. Craving leads to suffering. That’s an issue of action and result. The path leads to the end of suffering. That’s another action and result. And you see the path as preferable to the craving, because the results are on different levels. Then you figure out that the best way to develop the path is …
- Thinking Your Way to Stillness… They’re the ones that will eventually lead you to see things in terms of the four noble truths: looking at what’s going on simply as events and connections between events, seeing what the events do, and learning how to use that knowledge for the purpose of putting an end to suffering. So meditation does involve some thinking. It’s not simply being …
- Cornered… It’s easy to say that everything is fabricated, is inconstant, stressful and not-self and then wonder, “Okay, well what next?” What does all that mean? What do you do with that insight? The insight is useful only in the context of figuring out what you can do in terms of either the four noble truths or dependent co-arising. If you look …
- The Skill of Not Suffering… And that’s related to a second kind of suffering, the suffering of the four noble truths. This suffering is optional; it doesn’t have to be there. It comes from our own ignorance, from our own craving and clinging, and those things can be changed. We bring our awareness to the present moment to minimize our ignorance. We try to look at our …
- Mastering Pleasure & Pain… When the Buddha taught the four noble truths, he taught that there are duties that go along with each truth. In other words, the truth is not there simply to know. It’s there to act on. If your mind is overcome by pleasure or pain, then it’s not going to act on its duties: to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to …
- Painful Thinking… This is why the Buddha started his teachings with the four noble truths. There’s suffering in life and there’s a cause to that suffering, and you can put an end to the suffering by following a path of practice that puts an end to the cause. It sounds all very straightforward. Some people have complained that it seems to be a very …
- Papañca… What’s the action? What’s the result of the action? ** **This is why the Buddha expresses the four noble truths as cause and effect, or path and fruit. There’s a path of action that leads someplace. You don’t have to ask who’s walking the path. Just follow it, and you learn to see these things as processes before they turn …
- Remembering Ajaan Suwat… You want to bring the framework of the four noble truths to your thoughts, your words, your deeds. What’s going on in the mind? What’s going on in your actions? Take the Buddha seriously. This is a training, and you have to submit yourself to the training if you’re going to know whether this kind of discernment works or not. This …
- The River of Karma… This is where the four noble truths come in. You observe the action and ask, “Okay, where is the stress here?” At that point, it might be very subtle, but after a while you begin to notice: There is a level of stress. And you notice it because it goes up and down. So what do you do? Well, what did you do when …
- Smart About Lust… You haven’t seen the third noble truth yet, but that’s the whole purpose of the Buddha’s teaching the four noble truths: There is that possibility for the cessation of suffering. And it’s not just a blank lack of suffering, it’s a very positive well-being. Anything that stands in the way of that has a lot of drawbacks. This …
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