Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. Respect, Confidence, & Patience
     … Whatever progress you do make on the path means that much less suffering, that much more skill in how you relate to the things that would normally cause you to suffer or would normally bring about reactions that would make you suffer. So a lot of the practice lies in the attitude, the right attitude that underlies all the other right factors of the … 
  9. Tranquility & Insight
     … That’s what we experience, and because we do this in ignorance, we suffer. So to stop the suffering, we have to stop the ignorance and the passion. That’s what samatha and vipassanā, tranquility and insight, are all about. It’s through samatha, the Buddha said, that we overcome our passion, and through vipassanā, or insight, that we overcome our ignorance. We need … 
  10. A Real Education
     … How to be with pain and not suffer from it? How to be with difficulties and not suffer from them? I’ve heard someone say that the cause of suffering is wanting things to be different from what they are. But that’s not the case. There are certain things you have to accept, but you do want your mind to be different from … 
  11. Choose Your Actions Wisely
     … So, the Buddha’s teachings are all about what we’re doing and why we’re causing ourselves suffering through what we do—and why we don’t have to. He shows us what alternatives we have, alternative ways of acting that actually form a path away from that suffering. There’s a value judgment here, too: that suffering is not what you want … 
  12. The Right Touch
     … The typical picture is that they’re pessimistic—they’re all about suffering, suffering, suffering—but that typical picture is really wrong. The truths pinpoint exactly where the suffering is. It’s in an activity we do. That means it’s something we can learn how to stop doing. So, it’s good news. There’s also a cause for what we’re doing … 
  13. Exploring Contentment
     … Not being content with where he was in the practice meant that as long as there was still any suffering or any cause of suffering in his mind, he wouldn’t allow the practice just to sit there. He’d try to figure out what was causing that suffering and what qualities he would have to develop in order to see even deeper into … 
  14. Fears
     … These things are real and they do cause suffering — if you don’t work your way down into exactly where your attachments are. This is precisely the Buddhist take on fear: It comes from clinging and attachment. And the clinging is threatened by impermanence, by stress and suffering, by the fact that these things are beyond your control. The purpose of our training here … 
  15. True Protection for the World
     … When you see people who are creating the causes for suffering, you’ve got to have compassion for them, even if they haven’t yet started suffering yet from that. This is an extension of goodwill. The four brahma-viharas, or sublime attitudes, basically come down to two. There’s goodwill and then there’s equanimity. Then goodwill gets applied. When you see people … 
  16. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … I’ll put up with having delusion and I’ll put up with the suffering that comes from these things.” That’s not what you do. You’re discontent with the fact that the mind is creating suffering for itself. To stop that suffering, you want to learn how to delight in abandoning unskillful qualities and developing skillful ones, which often is the opposite … 
  17. Ingenuity
     … And particularly, because we have such a passion for creating suffering or holding on to things that make us suffer, we want to learn how to apply the basic principles of the Buddha’s teachings to help develop some dispassion for that suffering, so that we can let go, we can stop this continual production of suffering and suffering all the time. How can … 
  18. Only One Person
     … The things that keep them bound up in the cycle of suffering and then revenge for suffering and then more suffering and then more revenge for suffering: That goes nowhere. We’ve seen way too much of that. But the people who stand up and say, “No, I’m not going to continue that way”: Those are the ones who make the human world … 
  19. Hope
     … Because all those elements of doing can cause suffering. And when you’re causing suffering for yourself, no wonder the world seems to be a weighty place. You’re already weighing yourself down with all kinds of stuff. Then when other things come in from the outside and it’s like the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It’s just more than … 
  20. Analysis of Qualities
     … You begin to see it so clearly that you can understand how the mind creates unnecessary suffering for itself—because that’s the original question we’re trying answer as we follow the four noble truths: Why is there suffering? Because of craving. Where is the craving? The craving is in the mind. So the questions of appropriate attention come back to the questions … 
  21. Fighting Spirit
     … That’s the difference between the suffering in the three characteristics and suffering in the four noble truths. In the three characteristics, the simple fact that things change leads to stress. As long as you’re experiencing a body and experiencing the human world around that body, there’s going to be change, and there’s going to be stress coming from that. But … 
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