Search results for: "Suffering"
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- The Dead Snake Around Your Neck… And it’s precisely because these same processes shape our experience in the ordinary, everyday world as they do in meditation that the meditation is really a good tool for getting to understand how your mind creates suffering. That’s what the four noble truths are all about. It’s not that life is suffering. It’s that we create suffering in our clinging …
- Training the Mind to Train the Mind… So you might as well not even think about them.” But these are the big facts in life, the big things that cause us to suffer. And the Buddha’s message, of course, is that you can do something about them. Even though aging, illness, death, and separation are going to happen, you don’t have to suffer from them. The suffering is the …
- Strengthening Discernment… seeing, on the one hand, how some fabrications cause suffering and actually constitute suffering—suffering itself is a fabrication—and on the other, how you can turn some of these fabrications into the path. After all, the path is something you put together. Some people think the path is just being equanimous, learning how to watch things arise and pass, pass, pass away, and …
- Respect for Concentration… Because when the mind is concentrated, you’re taking all the elements of your experience that ordinarily cause suffering and you turn them into a path. The breath here: We can suffer a lot around the body, but we learn how to breathe in a way that’s comfortable. Feelings: We can work ourselves up into all kinds of problems about feelings of pain …
- Respect for the Mind… If you see any desire for causing anyone else any suffering in your intentions, he says not to act on that intention, whether it’s going to cause suffering for yourself or other people, or both. But if the intention looks okay, you can follow through with it. But then as you start acting on it, if you see any harmful results coming, you …
- Pain Is a Noble Truth… They’re just there, a part of nature, but the mind doesn’t suffer. To see the distinction between those two kinds of suffering, you really do have to probe into the pain. And you have to come from a position where you feel secure in doing the probing. This is why you learn how to deal with the pain for a while and …
- Look After Yourself with Ease… In this phrase, goodwill is informed by the teachings on karma, realizing that we create our own suffering and our own happiness. Happiness and suffering come from how well or poorly we look after ourselves. After all, our own craving is what enslaves us and causes suffering. And nobody is going to be able to undo our suffering for us. We have to follow …
- The Buddha’s Conventions… In terms of the language of the Dhamma, you want to look at things in terms of, one: “What is suffering? Where is the suffering?” And then, two: “What’s causing it?” The Buddha recommends asking not who is causing it, but what—what activity? He’s not saying whether there is or isn’t someone behind the activity, because he wants you to …
- Seeing the Stillness… When the Buddha taught the first noble truth, he said to comprehend suffering. That’s why we need to have this sense of wellbeing first, before we can look at stress and suffering for the purpose of comprehending it. If we don’t have a sense of wellbeing, then when we see suffering we’ll want to get rid of it or jump away …
- The Intelligence of Restraint… You can relate it either to the truth of stress or suffering, the truth of the origination of suffering, the truth of cessation, or the truth of the path. Try to see: “Where does it fall here?” Then, when you know where it falls, you can know, “What’s the duty with regard to that?” Right view teaches you about the path: the principle …
- Gladden, Steady, Release… If you internalize those shoulds, you’re going to suffer. But the Buddha’s should are different. You should learn how to comprehend suffering. You should learn how to abandon the cause of suffering, to develop the path so you can realize the cessation of suffering. These are all shoulds for your true well-being. These are friendly shoulds. So learn how to give …
- Not-selfing Your Selves… As the Buddha said, we put up with suffering to some extent, but then we figure that the only alternative to that suffering is the different pleasures that we can look for. Even though those pleasures may entail some problems, we don’t see any other alternative. So we say, “Well, it’s just part of life. You’ve got to accept that. If …
- The Whole Elephant… But still, you gain a glimpse of what it’s like to be totally free of suffering. Just the act of being in the six senses, being immersed in the world of the space and time in the six senses: There’s a lot of suffering there. That’s what motivates you to get rid of the suffering still remaining. So take heart in …
- One Thing Clear Through… That’s when you develop the gift of discernment, in which you realize the ways in which you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering. And you realize that it is unnecessary. There are ways of constructing your present moment that don’t have to make you suffer at all. When you see yourself clearly this way, then your greed, aversion, and delusion get weaker and …
- In Tune… There’s that statement that “The Great Way is not hard for those with no preferences.” Now, of course we prefer the end of suffering to suffering itself. But the Way does demand that we put our preferences aside as to what has to be done, what should be done. We live as a group because we can learn from one another, and hopefully …
- A Point of Balance… We all know that craving is the cause of suffering, and most of us think primarily of sensual craving: craving for sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. But that’s not the only kind of craving there is. There’s also craving for becoming and craving for non-becoming. In both cases, it’s a push into the future. In fact, in all three …
- To Get Ourselves… When you’re trying to get other people, there’s always the question: “Well, why do you want other people? What do you want out of them?” But when you’re trying to get yourself, you look at the fact that you’re suffering, and someplace in the mind is that desire to stop suffering. When you’re honest with yourself, you realize that …
- Emotion… This is one the reasons why the breath is such an important meditation topic, because it comes in right early in the Buddha’s description of how suffering arises. If you breathe in an ignorant way, you can cause suffering. If you look at your emotions carefully, you realize that the way you breathe has an impact on the emotion, and the emotion has …
- Framing the Body… At the end of each lifetime, he had a strong feeling of, “What suffering! What suffering!” Yet, in spite of the suffering, we keep coming back. Think of King Koravya in conversation with the monk Ven. Ratthapala. Ratthapala’s pointing out to him the truths of aging, illness and death. When he was young, he was strong. But now he’s old. He means …
- Guarding Against Trouble… What is suffering? What leads to suffering? What can be done to put an end to suffering? Those questions are useful. So right now as you’re meditating, what are you going to do to help put an end to suffering? Well, you develop concentration, you develop mindfulness. What you’re doing is developing the path. And so you pay attention to this: What …
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