Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Persistence
     … As the Buddha said, if you attain the Dhamma eye, the amount of suffering left ahead of you is like dirt under a fingernail, whereas if you haven’t, the amount of suffering ahead of you is like all the dirt in the Earth. So which is more painful? Which is longer? Think about these things until you have a sense that you really … 
  3. Conviction in Charge
     … You see clearly what in the mind leads to suffering and what in the mind can take you away from suffering. You do your best to develop what’s going to take you away from suffering and to abandon what will lead to suffering. And eventually, the Buddha said, you come to a realization, as things begin to open up in the mind, that … 
  4. Refuge in an Admirable Friend
     … As he says, the question that lies at the beginning of discernment is going to someone who is knowledgeable and asking, “What is skillful?” “What is unskillful?” “What, when I do, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” “What, when I do, will lead to my long-term harm and suffering?” The wisdom there is in seeing that if you’re going … 
  5. Worldly Effort
     … The ending of suffering takes effort. The question is, which effort are you going to focus on? Just keeping alive or putting an end to suffering? Of course, keeping alive requires dealing with suffering, trying to minimize it. But the question is, how far are you going to go? We like to think that if we get skillful enough in the way we lead … 
  6. Anger
     … the things you do that lead to suffering and the things you can do that lead to the end of suffering. The doing there is important, because we shape our experience much more than we normally imagine, and insight lies in seeing precisely that fact: seeing what we’re doing to shape our experience, even though we may think we’re sitting here perfectly … 
  7. Fabricating against Defilement
     … remembering what led to suffering in the past is probably going to lead to suffering again, no matter how attractive it may seem right now. Other practices that did lead the mind to clarity in the past will probably do it again. So even though the practices may seem difficult, you learn to inspire a sense of desire in yourself to do them. This … 
  8. Bringing Right resolve
     … When you see that there’s something causing you to suffer, you want to do something about it. If you see something causing other people to suffer and you can help them, you want to do something about it. If you can’t help them, you have to develop equanimity. The same for yourself: There are some areas where you can’t change the … 
  9. Appropriate Attention
     … Why are we suffering? What are we doing that’s creating the suffering and what can we do to stop? He was very critical of teachers who would engage in what he called “bombast”: flowery words, beautiful sentiments that don’t offer any guidance that could be applied to that question, “What should I do next? What is the wisest thing to do next … 
  10. Inner Negotiating Skills
     … You should try to comprehend suffering, you should try to abandon its cause, you should try to realize the cessation of suffering, you should try to develop the path—those are your shoulds. And where are they aimed? They’re aimed at true happiness. In Western culture, the shoulds are not necessarily aimed at your happiness, which is why there’s always an internal … 
  11. Spread Goodness Around
     … It means that nobody in the world is a stranger, in the sense that the suffering they’re going through is not strange: You’ve been there. You’ve had that suffering, too. They say that after the Buddha’s awakening, he surveyed the world with the eye of a Buddha, and he saw that all beings were on fire with the fires of … 
  12. Distractive Thoughts
     … You’ve gained an important insight into how the mind creates suffering, how things don’t have to entail suffering. There was an element of intention, and you were doing something to the pain that actually made the mind suffer. That’s an important lesson. On the other hand, if there are states of mind that are fascinated with lust, turn around and try … 
  13. Equanimity Isn’t Everything
     … There are lots of different ways you can use these fabrications to counteract those causes of stress and suffering that are really deeply entrenched. You have to learn through your own experience which causes of suffering respond to which type of approach. We may like the idea that “We’ll just watch this, and it’ll go away on its own eventually, and that … 
  14. Interdependence & Death
     … It’s not a pretty image, because there’s suffering on both sides. Of course, those who are being fed on are suffering, but those who have to feed suffer as well. When you’re in a position where you need to feed, it’s very precarious. The Buddha never celebrated the principle of interconnectedness, because it’s all tied up in suffering, pain … 
  15. No Preferences
     … the end of suffering. It gives rise to vision, gives rise to knowledge, brings about peace, knowledge, nibbana. So that’s what makes the Buddha’s teaching special: He had found a path of action. That’s what’s worth talking about: looking at which paths of action lead to suffering, which ones lead to the end of suffering, and then following the one … 
  16. Intent
     … And the good news here, of course, is that if you push yourself in the right direction or act in the right direction in the present moment, then when things come in from the past, you don’t have to suffer from them. You can develop the skills to handle them. The Buddha compares this to being a wealthy person. If a wealthy person … 
  17. Skills to Make You Free
     … When you have no basis for making those kinds of decisions, you’re left defenseless, you’re left suffering. It’s because of this that I’m always amazed at people who say the Buddha doesn’t teach free will—that he teaches that everything is determined—because he was so opposed to that view. The other thing that I find amazing is that … 
  18. Heedfulness
     … After all, the Buddha says that the reason we’re suffering is because of things we’re doing in the present moment in the mind, and that’s much more interesting than the body. We suffer because of our craving, we suffer in our clinging, and those are things you can see. Sometimes you cling to your sense of the body. Sometimes you cling … 
  19. Consistently on the Path
    In the Buddha’s analysis of the causes leading to suffering, there are three things that follow immediately on ignorance: bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, the feelings you focus on and the perceptions you hold in mind, the images you give to yourself of the world and of yourself. As long as … 
  20. Dwelling in Emptiness
    Ajaan Suwat once said that, as a rule of thumb in your meditation, you can recognize happiness as the stillness, and suffering as the areas that are still disturbed. If you want to see the first noble truth, if you want to see the three characteristics, look at where there’s disturbance. In fact, one of the Buddha’s main teachings on emptiness is … 
  21. Rebirth & Not-Self
     … We end up creating a lot of suffering around the aggregates, even though we use them to look for pleasure. We get some pleasure out of them. The Buddha doesn’t deny that. He said that if it weren’t for the pleasures offered by the aggregates, we wouldn’t fall for them. But the extent to which we cling to them—and often … 
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