Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. The Three Perceptions as Tools
     … The perceptions are inconstancy, anicca, stress or suffering, dukkha, and not-self, anattā. Sometimes you hear them referred to as three characteristics, but the Buddha himself never referred to them in that way. He was less interested in looking at the characteristics of what things are, or in making statements about reality out there, and was more interested in developing perceptions that will have … 
  3. How to Look, How to Listen
     … The faults of others are their business, because you’re not suffering from their faults. You can make yourself suffer over their faults, but it’s the “making yourself suffer”: That’s the problem, because it often turns around and you start making them suffer, too. But if you look inside and see: “I’m thinking in the wrong way. I’m breathing in … 
  4. Using Your Many Minds
     … The craving comes from hearing that there are other people who have been able to put and end to suffering, and you want that end of suffering as well. That’s a healthy craving. You want to encourage it. As for conceit, you hear that there are other people who are able to do this, and you say to yourself, “Well, why can’t … 
  5. Matters of Life & Death
     … If that’s our attitude, we’re going to suffer a lot when these things come, as they inevitably will, because they are normal. So the most important training we can take on is the training that teaches how to face aging without suffering, how to face illness without suffering, how to face death without suffering. We want to keep these things in mind … 
  6. The Buddha’s Program
     … They also allow you to call into question any assumptions that would make you suffer. What are the assumptions that are making you suffer right now? Can you question them? If you can’t question them now, what are you going to do when you die? One of the hardest things about dying is the question, “What will become of me?” Like Elisa Doolittle … 
  7. Don’t Limit Yourself
     … One very good use is to notice ways in which we’re creating unnecessary stress and suffering for ourselves and for other people, and to learn how to stop. In fact, as the Buddha said, that’s the primary good use of the meditation. So this is what we’re here for, to understand what we’re doing that’s causing unnecessary suffering, how … 
  8. Bewildered
     … How many different ways can the mind create suffering around pain? The fact of pain, both physical and mental, is one of those things that the Buddha says you have to accept. This is going to happen. There will be physical pains; there will be mental pains. But you don’t just sit there with them. You’re trying to figure them out. In … 
  9. A Practice, Personal & Social
     … That’s opposed to the people who can face death and not suffer. The second group creates a lot less suffering for the people around them as well. So learning these skills is not a selfish thing. You’re not the only one who’s going to benefit. Try to keep that in mind: that although this is a personal practice, it’s not … 
  10. In Line with the Truth
     … Then we come back and say, “Well, maybe let’s try it again.” If we keep going around and around like this, it’s a sad affair because we’re not the only ones who suffer. We create lots of suffering for the people around us, too. Each time you’re born, you need food, clothing, shelter, medicine. As a human being, you need … 
  11. A Good Dish of Concentration
    That phrase in the chant just now, “those who don’t discern suffering,” sounds strange. We all know that we have suffering. The problem is that we don’t really discern it. To discern it, in the Buddha’s terms, would be to see it in terms of the five clinging-aggregates, and that’s usually not the first thought that occurs to us … 
  12. On Denying Defilement
     … If the mind were totally dark, it wouldn’t even recognize suffering as such, or recognize its connection to your actions. It wouldn’t realize that suffering is optional, or that something should be done about it. That would be total darkness. You wouldn’t be able to see that what you were doing to cause the suffering. But you do have this ability … 
  13. Helping Others Is a Battle
     … It usually takes some insight into how they’re suffering for them to be able to change their ways. But look at yourself—if there were no sense that you’re suffering, that there’s something wrong, you wouldn’t try to train yourself. You’d just stay as you are. So, even though when we’re spreading thoughts of goodwill, there’s a … 
  14. Fully Here
     … You want your mind to be prepared so that you don’t have to suffer through aging, you don’t have to suffer through illness, you don’t have to suffer through death. Things may happen. These things will happen of course, but when the mind is trained, it doesn’t have to suffer. And the mind doesn’t just naturally develop good qualities … 
  15. Self-Starting
     … You saw that you were suffering, and here was an opportunity to go beyond suffering. It would be a shame to turn away from that. If you really care for yourself, you stick with the practice. Then there’s the world as a governing principle. Realize that there are people in the world who can read minds. When you’re getting discouraged, what are … 
  16. Wandering Aimlessly
     … This wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t suffering and stress inherent in all this. So that’s what we need to learn about. As long as we don’t see the suffering and stress, realizing that it’s implicit in every kind of wandering there is, we’re going to keep on wandering. Even if you get the mind nicely concentrated … 
  17. Training the Whole Mind
     … Get so that it really does know how to deal with the aggregates as they arise, how to deal with pain so it doesn’t turn it into suffering, how to deal with pleasure so it doesn’t turn it into suffering. Get so that the mind develops a basic intelligence in sorting itself out, managing itself, so that all your mental powers suddenly … 
  18. Self-starting
     … We don’t usually think about being trapped in a good nature, but there was once a Dharma teacher who said he didn’t want to live in a world without suffering, because he then couldn’t exercise his compassion. Which sounds nice, but the more you think about it, the stranger it sounds: You need somebody suffering so that you can exercise your … 
  19. A Basis in Well-being
     … results of your meditation.” But there’s a question of how useful those openings are, how real they are, and the extent to which they really resolve issues of suffering. The simple fact that the opening came while you were strung out doesn’t mean that it was true. The mind has to be in a well-balanced state of well-being for you … 
  20. Different Paths Go Different Places
     … There is the path to the end of suffering. There’s also a path to heaven. There’s a path to rebirth as a human being. There’s the path leading to rebirth as a dog or another common animal, and then down to the lower realms. Some of the paths start out enjoyable and then go bad. Others start out bad and then … 
  21. Truth as Medicine
     … Does the world really exist outside the information we get through our senses? That’s one of those issues the Buddha said, “Don’t go there.” What we can know though is what we directly experience in terms of suffering and stress. Ideally, you know when the mind is suffering, you can tell when it’s not. Yet even that we tend to cover … 
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