Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. Goal Orientation
     … You hear that other people have gained the end of suffering, and you’d like to gain the end of suffering, too. Everything about the Buddha’s teachings is very goal-oriented. The Buddha himself was very goal-oriented. Look at his quest for awakening: six years of trying all kinds of different methods, even putting himself through torture. If one method didn’t … 
  14. Look After Yourself with Ease
     … So even though you’re suffering hardships, your mind doesn’t have to suffer. You’re able to use your ingenuity to make the best out of a bad situation. So you’re not being self-indulgent, you’re learning how to be unburdensome, more self-reliant. So think about the skills you need to develop to align yourself and not be a burden … 
  15. To Keep You Going
     … Compassion, of course, comes from the realization that your happiness can’t depend on the suffering of others. And then finally there’s the quality of purity, in which you really do make sure that your actions don’t cause any suffering or any harm. You have to reflect on your actions and their results, again and again and again. Learning to recognize your … 
  16. Control
     … You wish for those who are suffering to be freed from their suffering. As for those who are happy, you hope that they learn how to maintain their happiness. But then there are a lot of cases in this world where people are suffering and you can’t do a thing about it. It’s totally beyond your control. There are people who are … 
  17. The Reality of Emotions
     … But you can also fabricate them with the knowledge that leads to the end of suffering. So look at where you are on the path. Sometimes it requires focusing on the grief, focusing on the discomfort. There’s a passage in the sutta on transcendent dependent co-arising that traces all the factors leading up to suffering, but then states that from suffering you … 
  18. A Multilingual Mind
     … how your intentions give rise to suffering, how the process of fabrication gives rise to suffering. He wants you to look at these things as a process so that you can understand the patterns. The first step is to see what kinds of fabrication are blatantly unskillful, so that you can learn how to drop them. And then as your sensitivity to the idea … 
  19. Injustice
     … When you see that people are suffering, goodwill turns into compassion: wanting for that suffering to end. When you see that other people are happy, you have empathetic joy for their happiness. You’re not jealous; you’re not resentful. But then you come across cases where someone seems to be happy and fortunate, prosperous, and yet they don’t seem to deserve it … 
  20. Empathetic Joy
     … But the fact that those things are in the past doesn’t mean we have to suffer from them. That’s where our choice lies: in realizing you don’t have to suffer. It gives you energy to react as skillfully as you can and be proactive as skillfully as you can with whatever potentials come up in your life. So don’t hesitate … 
  21. The Purpose of Empathetic Joy
     … Compassion leads to a higher level of concentration than goodwill, perhaps because the desire to help those who are suffering, or those who are creating the causes for suffering, is a more uplifting emotion than the simple desire to see beings be happy. You open up your heart more to those who are suffering, and with that opening of the heart there’s a … 
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