Search results for: "Suffering"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- What Makes Concentration Right… Right view tells you that if you’re going to find an end to suffering, you have to look at what the mind is doing. We tend to think that we’re suffering from things outside, and there is that level of suffering. But the reason we’re suffering from things outside, both good and bad, comes from the fact that the mind is …
- Think of the Consequences… After all, the teachings of the Buddha are about putting an end to suffering and stress. When you realize that suffering and stress come from your actions, then you want to resolve to act in a way that doesn’t cause any suffering, doesn’t cause any stress. That’s how right view and right resolve are connected. Right resolve gives focus to right …
- Sensitive to the Mind… The mind is suffering, the mind has stress, and you can’t just sit there and watch it be stressed out, you can’t sit and watch it suffering. After all, as the Buddha said, there are four noble truths. There’s not just the truth of suffering, And he didn’t say, Life is suffering, he said, Suffering is in the clinging. The …
- Getting Yourself… The issue is that we’re suffering, and the suffering is coming from our own actions. We’ve got to learn how to train ourselves in how to think, how to speak, how to act in such a way that we’re not causing suffering. We have to be more circumspect. We have to be more alert to what we’re doing. I was …
- The Second Noble Truth… Inevitably, they’re going to end, and there’s always going to be suffering involved as they tear away. This was another theme in that author’s writings: that we have to put up with the suffering because otherwise we wouldn’t be involved with life’s great adventure. But as the Buddha said, suffering in a pointless universe is not really worth it …
- Training Your Desires … That way, if you’re going to look for the cause of suffering, you have to look inside. That’s another message from the four noble truths. Again, it’s a message that we may not like to hear. We like to blame our suffering on other people. But think about it. If your suffering comes from other people, what are you going to …
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