Search results for: "Suffering"
- Page 49
- A Pure Happiness… That’s what turns these things into suffering. If you don’t cling, they don’t cause you to suffer. There’s nothing in them inherently that makes you have to suffer. This is an important insight, because if you think of suffering as an enormous monolithic block you’ve got to chip through, if you think of your defilements as huge monolithic blocks …
- Meaning & Purpose… Then he points out that this process, which in so many ways can lead to suffering, can be turned to make a path to the end of suffering. That’s a large part of his genius. We suffer because we’re attached to form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. But we can use those things to create the path, and we hold on as …
- Reflecting on Karma… So we reflect on karma to give a sense of confidence that there is a way out of all this suffering. There’s a passage where the Buddha said that suffering gives rise to conviction. If you reflect on the fact that you’re suffering and you don’t want to stay there, you’ve got to get out. And there’s the Buddha …
- Catch It in the Act… The mind is constantly creating suffering through its unskillful ideas, its unskillful notions. You’ve got to stop it to whatever extent you can. You have to catch in the act. It’s like seeing a dog using your front lawn as a bathroom. If you throw a rock at it after it’s done its business, it’s going to keep coming back …
- The Buddha Defines Wisdom… It gives you a foundation so that you’re not feeling threatened by whatever stress or suffering there is in the mind. You find that at least one part of the mind is not stressed out. It’s not suffering, so you focus your attention there. Take that as your foundation. And then from that foundation, you can watch the suffering, watch the stress …
- It’s All about Action… You see suffering as a kind of action, you see the causes of suffering as kinds of action, and you see the things you could do to do differently to put an end to that suffering as kinds of action. Everything talked about in the Dhamma relates to actions. When people talk about interconnectedness: We’re connected through our actions. We’re not connected …
- Things Aren’t as They Should Be… They have no freedom to choose whether or not to do these things. “When you teach that,” the Buddha said, “you leave people unprotected and bewildered.” Now, “bewildered” is the term he uses for our ordinary reaction to suffering. Suffering comes in ways that we don’t understand. If you think that everything that you’re going to experience in terms of suffering or …
- Things As They Function… Which kinds of actions are worth doing, which ones are not worth doing, which kinds of actions lead to suffering, which kinds of actions lead away? By applying that framework, he found that he could learn an awful lot about how things function and how he could steer their functioning in the direction of the end of suffering. So this is why we meditate …
- The Pain of Conviction… There’s a passage where the Buddha’s discussing the causes that lead to suffering, and then beyond suffering, the next step is conviction, conviction that there’s a way out. It doesn’t end the suffering, but it actually puts a different cast on it. Because conviction itself has both a pleasant and an unpleasant side. The pleasant side, of course, is that …
- Mountains Moving In… In fact, the two extremes that he said the middle way avoids were criticized because they created suffering. The search for happiness among sensual pleasures creates suffering. Self-torment creates suffering. The only path to true happiness is the middle way: the noble eightfold path. That was one of his first teachings. You look at the qualities you develop as part of that path …
- Purifying Gold… It was his willingness to stick with that one question that kept him going all the way to the end of suffering. So when you get your mind to settle down, when it does get quiet, remind yourself that you’re not here just to get quiet. You’re here to solve the problem of suffering. Take your lump of gold and make it …
- Something New… Why are we suffering? We’re suffering because of things we’re doing, but we don’t have to keep on doing the things we’re doing. We can change. We can bring something new into the world. In fact, with every moment, we have that possibility. You can bring something new into the world, something unexpected. So why not make it unexpectedly good …
- Meaning Through Perfections… It had no meaning, just lots and lots of suffering interspaced with some respite, but then more suffering again. He began to think: What would be a meaningful life in this context? And he came to the conclusion that the only life with any meaning would be one that wants to get out. The way out was what he found in the third knowledge …
- Dhamma Medicine for Free… If you do all these processes— bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and mental fabrication—with as much knowledge as possible, that cuts through a lot of the suffering that would ordinarily develop around the breath. We don’t think of there being much suffering around the breath, but if there’s a sense of dis-ease in the body, it begins to spread into the …
- Beyond Imagination… We’re very creative—and unfortunately, it’s usually creativity that ends up in suffering. We’re creative in the ways we suffer, because every life we could create ends in aging, illness, and death, separation, over and over and over again. There’s that chant that we often recite: “I’m subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, subject to separation …
- The Best News in the World… right resolve, right mindfulness, right effort, ultimately all eight factors of the noble eightfold path, finally developing right view, realizing that the issue that he was trying to solve was the problem of suffering, and that to get to the deathless, first you had to understand suffering, figure out its cause, develop a path of practice so that you can abandon the cause, and …
- The Door of the Cage… The four noble truths are a variation, or a development, of the teaching on karma—what you do that leads to suffering, what you do that leads to the end of suffering. It’s all about action. So the Buddha’s not leaving you totally adrift. He’s not depriving you of your food. You feed off of right view, feed off of the …
- Body & Food… So look at things that are close at hand—this body, the food it feeds on—and you see that they have implications that stretch far into the distance as you see exactly how much your existence as a human being creates this network of suffering around it. You see the suffering that goes into having to feed all the time, having to take …
- The Dhamma Wheel… For example, with regard to suffering or stress, the first noble truth, the duty is to comprehend it. Comprehending, we learn from another sutta in the Canon, means comprehending to the point of having no more passion, aversion, and delusion around it. Ordinarily we wouldn’t think that we’d have any passion for suffering. But remember, the Buddha’s definition of suffering is …
- Happy About Kamma… It may explain a lot of suffering, but it doesn’t justify the suffering. It just simply says that this is why it’s there, but the way kamma works also offers the way out. So even though we’ve done bad things in the past, we don’t have to suffer for them. Think of that image of the salt crystal: You put …
- Load next page...
