Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Your Ancestral Territory
     … What did the Dhamma teach that other people have been able to use to get past suffering? My sufferings, even though they may be modern American sufferings, are at the basis no different from the sufferings and the defilements of people in that time. They were able to find their way out. Why can’t I?” And you approach every problem with the brahma … 
  3. Feeding on Ardency
     … When you comprehend suffering, it’s not simply watching suffering. You try to understand it to the point of dispassion for it. That requires a lot of understanding. Think about the Buddha’s five-step program for inducing dispassion. It requires a lot of effort. You have to watch things as they’re originated to figure out what their cause is. It takes a … 
  4. Delight in Striving
     … We’re not here just accepting, accepting, accepting things, because a lot of things are pretty unacceptable—particularly with the problem of suffering. If the Buddha had us just accept suffering, he himself would have gone back to the palace and never would have become a Buddha. If he had accepted aging, illness, and death, he wouldn’t have found the deathless. These are … 
  5. The Rewards of Right View
     … If you were suffering, it was because you deserved to suffer: That’s how they interpreted the teachings. But that’s not what the Buddha meant by those teachings at all. His vision of karma and rebirth was much larger than that. On the one hand, it’s because we do choose our actions—and our actions are under our control—that all the … 
  6. Delight in Stillness
     … As Ajaan Suwat commented one time, that’s the suffering the Buddha’s talking about. You don’t have to look elsewhere, anywhere far away for the suffering of the four noble truths. Right there, where the mind is disturbing itself, that’s suffering. You want to figure out why: What’s the craving that’s getting in the way? What are you clinging … 
  7. Not-self in Context
     … It fits under the fact that he saw in the first noble truth that suffering is clinging, and there are four kinds of clinging. The deepest and most tenacious is clinging to your ideas of self. If you put an end to clinging, though, there’s no suffering. You do that by putting an end to craving. This means you also have to get … 
  8. Patience
     … When the Buddha talks about suffering in the four noble truths, it’s the suffering we place on ourselves unnecessarily. Like that old question Ajaan Suwat would ask about the mountain. “Is the mountain heavy? Well, yes, it’s heavy in and of itself, but as long as you don’t pick it up, it’s not going to be heavy for you.” That … 
  9. Mindful & Discerning 24/7
     … A thought of laziness may be clever, but it’s basically stupid because, after all, it’s making you suffer. If you saw things in the right way, the wise way, you wouldn’t be suffering. Think of the arahants. It’s not that when they gain awakening, they have no more kamma from the past. They still have past kamma that they have … 
  10. A Decent Education
     … You’ve seen people who suffer in their lives and all they can think about is, “This isn’t going right, that isn’t going right, people don’t sympathize with me.” They do nothing but pile more suffering onto the original suffering. When they see a difficult challenge, they just faint. They whine and complain. But that’s not the Buddha’s way … 
  11. Overcoming Complacency
     … And so the question is, now that you’ve got these khandhas, what are you creating out of them? Are you creating more suffering or are you creating the path to the end of suffering? And your sense of self: To which direction is it leading you? Because you notice that, when the Buddha teaches, he doesn’t have you drop your sense of … 
  12. Beneficial Thinking
     … The purpose of this is to remind ourselves we have a lot of suffering around the body in one way or another. Each of us is attached to the body in a different way. But in every way, the attachment is a cause of suffering. Which doesn’t mean we’re going to take the body out and throw it away. We use it … 
  13. Learning How to Talk to Yourself
     … Now you may start thinking of some cases where you say, “I’d like to see this person suffer a little bit, because after all, when they suffer, justice will be done. They’ve been doing bad things in the past.” But a lot of people, when they suffer like that, don’t admit that what the wrong they did has anything to do … 
  14. Training Your Inner Teacher
    We’re trying to find a special kind of truth inside ourselves, the truth of the end of suffering, a deathless dimension that can be accessed by the mind. The Buddha describes the steps in awakening to that truth. You start by finding a teacher who’s reliable, and you listen to the Dhamma; you pay careful attention; you try to remember the Dhamma … 
  15. Why Now
     … If the mind is in good shape, then you can be in horrible situations and not suffer. If the mind is in bad shape, you can be in the best situations outside and still create a lot of suffering for yourself and the people around you. So the shape of your mind, the state of your mind should be your top priority—your primary … 
  16. Afraid of Inner Pleasure
     … This is *the *basic message of the four noble truths, that the suffering we experience in the world, the suffering that really weighs down the mind, comes from inside. People can be cruel outside; people can do horrible things outside. And they do. But it’s how you respond, how you process that: That’s what makes you suffer. This is why we hear … 
  17. The Desire for Freedom
     … The Buddha didn’t teach simply the way to manage suffering. The third noble truth is the cessation of suffering—total. That’s what he was able to find, and he found it because he didn’t let himself rest content with anything less. His samvega was coupled with pasada—confidence that there had to be a way out. He didn’t have any … 
  18. The Science of Meditation
     … They’re going to lead to suffering, to harm. If there were no pattern, the things you learn today wouldn’t be applicable tomorrow. You’d never know. Meditation, trying to learn any skill, would be a waste of time, because the rules could change at a moment’s notice. And if your actions didn’t make a difference, why are you sitting here … 
  19. Interested in the Breath
     … What’s Dhamma? It’s the truth about what’s going on in the mind and particularly, the truth about how the mind is creating unnecessary suffering for itself. This should be something you find very interesting because we all want happiness. Everything we do has someplace in it a intention or a desire for happiness. Yet if you look at the results of … 
  20. Visakha Puja – Shaking the Earth
     … So, we commemorate these events every year by paying homage to the Buddha, by paying homage to his awakening, homage to the fact that he was able to find the path to the end of suffering and teach it to others, then gained total release from birth, aging, illness, and death. Those are momentous events. The tradition has it that the Earth quaked, at … 
  21. Take the One Seat
     … That way, you can watch them in action and figure out: “What exactly am I doing here? Where’s the misunderstanding? What is the link that I’m not seeing that’s causing me to create suffering? Why do I find it so delicious? Why do I find it so entertaining to create suffering?” That’s what you’ve got to look for. As … 
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