Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Self-Healing
     … You don’t have to suffer from them. This doesn’t mean that you’re unfeeling. You see that people are suffering, but you don’t have to take their suffering on. When you don’t take their suffering on—when you don’t feed on it—then you’re in a better position to help. You’re not wounding yourself; you’re not … 
  3. Cause & Effect Right Now
     … the Buddha talking about realizing four truths—that there’s stress and suffering, that there’s a cause, there’s a cessation of suffering, and there’s a path to the cessation. When he boiled it down even further than that, it was a principle of causality, which basically comes down to the idea that some causes have an effect immediately and others have … 
  4. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … that if there is suffering in the mind, it’s caused by the mind. No matter how much you may be suffering over bad things outside, you have to realize that the important part is how you *process *the bad things outside—and how you process the good things outside, too. Because it is possible for things outside to be perfectly fine and yet … 
  5. Think Outside the Ruts
     … After all, our views of reality are making us suffer. The Dhamma’s offering us another way of looking at reality altogether. Learn how to use the teaching on kamma, learn how to use the teaching on rebirth in a skillful way, so that you can come up with new narratives—new patterns of thinking that don’t cause you to suffer. So, think … 
  6. Questions in the Practice
     … the end of suffering. The questions that revolve around these areas: these are the ones worth asking, these are the ones you should bring to your practice. As for the other questions, you can put them aside. Once you deal with the problem-“Why is it the mind is causing itself suffering? Can it learn ways not to cause itself suffering?”… Once you really … 
  7. Question Your Actions
    One of the reasons we suffer is because we crave what the Buddha calls becoming. It’s the act of taking on an identity in a world of experience: in other words, trying to figure out who you are and where you are. One of the other ways we suffer is, once we’ve got an identity of that sort, we don’t like … 
  8. Compassion for People on Fire
     … Yet even they suffer. In the case of King Koravya, he was suffering from things that were inconstant, stressful, not-self. Inconstancy relates to aging. Stress, of course, relates to illness. Death relates to not-self, whatever you have now you’re going to have to let go. So here the king was suffering from these things. There was no one who could take … 
  9. Stay
     … When the Buddha talks about comprehending suffering, you don’t simply understand the ideas of suffering or what the Buddha’s analysis of suffering was. You get to the point where you have no more passion, aversion, or delusion for your own sufferings. That’s what it really means to comprehend suffering—to see that it’s not worth it and to agree that … 
  10. Comprehending Clinging
    Our duty with regard to suffering and stress is to comprehend it. Comprehending means putting an end to our passion, aversion, and delusion around it. In the first noble truth, the Buddha defines suffering and stress, in its short version, as clinging to the five aggregates. When we hear that, we tend to focus on the aggregates—that we need to comprehend them. Which … 
  11. What It All Comes From
     … But the Buddha realized that this still didn’t end the problem of suffering. So he took the knowledge he’d gained from those first two knowledges and applied it to the question of: What is the suffering right now? What’s causing it? And is there a path of practice that leads to an end of suffering? He found that there was. That … 
  12. An Inside Job
     … When they look at your brain, it doesn’t make any difference to them whether your brain is suffering or not. But for you, you feel the suffering inside, and it does make a big difference. In fact, they can’t tell why you change your mind, or how you experience a perception or an intention. There are lots of things they can’t … 
  13. Dhamma in Line with the Dhamma
     … If you want to stay, there’s going to be suffering. If you want to get out of the suffering, you’ve got to learn how to stop feeding on things. When the Buddha says “practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma,” he defines it as practicing for the sake of disenchantment and dispassion. That may sound a little cold, but you remember … 
  14. Recollection of the Buddha
     … There are so many issues you can get involved in, so many debates, so many lines of thinking, lines of exploration you can follow that would pull you away from the main issue, which is the end of suffering. And even with issues that are related to the end of suffering, you can frame them in ways that pull you away. So the Buddha … 
  15. Rooted in Desire
     … You look at the way you cause suffering and you decide, “Do I want to continue doing this? I have the choice to stop.” And you look at the kind of desires that lead to suffering. The big one is the desire for sensuality. Then there’s the desire for ill will—you want to see other people suffer—but that’s unskillful. Or … 
  16. The Whole Story
     … The Buddha didn’t say that life is suffering. Life has four truths that he has you use as a pattern for understanding things. There is suffering and there is the cause, but there’s also a path to the end of suffering and a true end to suffering that comes when you abandon the cause of suffering. Those are all truths. And so … 
  17. For Your Future’s Sake
    The Buddha said that the question that lies at the beginning of discernment is, “What, when I do, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What, when I do, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering?” It’s a question that’s aimed at the future. In other words, you focus on what you’re doing right now, but you … 
  18. There is This
    There’s a famous simile in the texts where a man is suffering from pain. He gets tied up in anxiety and misery around the pain. And the Buddha says it’s like being shot with an arrow and then shooting yourself with a second arrow. The physical pain is the first arrow; the mental pain is the second one. And it’s the … 
  19. High Level Metta
     … You’re going to suffer. They’re going to suffer. So you learn how to think about it. You learn how to use all these kinds of fabrication to develop that kind of determination. You start with the directed thought and evaluation. There are those phrases we chant: “May all beings be happy; free from suffering. May they look after themselves with ease.” That … 
  20. Working Hypotheses
     … The Buddha’s basically saying in the four truths that the reason we suffer is that we hug our suffering to ourselves. The things that we love the most are the things that cause us to suffer the most. That truth goes against the grain, but we’ve probably noticed that, yes, it does apply to a lot of things in life. So, what … 
  21. Respect for the Path
     … Once you’ve solved this problem—the mind’s ignorant ways of causing itself stress and suffering—then nothing else is going to be a problem to weigh down the mind. The Dhamma is that large. It covers all problems, takes care of all problems that weigh down the mind, all the ways in which we cause ourselves stress and suffering. When we take … 
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