Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Keeping Your Head
     … The duties that he gave in the four noble truths are for people who, of their own accord, want to put an end to suffering, who see that their untrained mind is causing trouble for themselves and for other people. They see that this is the area where they have real responsibility as well as the ability to make a difference. You do have … 
  3. Heedfulness
     … They really do cause suffering. Now their solution is to try to figure out a way of engineering society so that we can be protected from our delusion. But that’s really difficult. The only way you’re going to protect yourself from delusion is by watching your actions, watching what you’re doing. There was a famous pianist one time who was saying … 
  4. From Compunction to Release
     … You act on craving, there’s going to be suffering, so craving is something you should abandon. If you act on the noble eightfold path, you’ll reach the end of suffering, so the path is something you should develop. The path is obviously better than craving. Now, it’s easy to understand that in the abstract, but a lot of the practice is … 
  5. The Community of the Wise
     … We want to be able to look at them to see which ones are really conducive to the end of suffering and which ones simply create more suffering. My first year as a monk back in Thailand, I noticed I was spending a lot of time sorting through my attitudes. At first I was concerned about this. I felt I really should be spending … 
  6. An Apprenticeship in Integrity
     … putting an end to suffering. So to understand him, you have to understand not only the words he uses to describe suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation, you have to understand why all this is important, why he gives this such high priority. When Westerners first encountered the texts out of context, they’d say, “Oh, this is a … 
  7. Lessons from Stilling the Mind
     … We suffer not just because of the words we think. Think of little children who don’t know any language at all. They suffer a lot and they’re operating on a pre-verbal level. We have our pre-verbal levels, too. You have to get your mind down to a pre-verbal level if you really want to understand it, to see exactly … 
  8. Your Own Karma
     … If they starve, they’re not going to suffer. You’re the one who’s going to suffer if you take them on. Then there’s another technique the Buddha recommends, which is relaxing the fabrication of thought. This applies to cases when you’re sensitive enough to the breath energy in the body that you can tell: When a thought arises, there’s … 
  9. The World of the Body
     … We’ve got this body that we can use to practice, and we can learn how to understand how the mind causes itself suffering by examining the body, by staying with the breath, trying to be centered here in the body, because it’s right in here where things are going to become clear. When you’re focused on the breath, you’re right … 
  10. Admirable Intentions
     … This is how the path helps you abandon craving—which is the cause of suffering—and it helps you to comprehend suffering itself, realizing that suffering is not so much pains caused by people or things outside, it’s the mind’s own clinging. You see how it clings. You see that there’s stress in the clinging, and that helps you to comprehend … 
  11. Calm & Insight
     … The Buddha’s pointing to the fact that the way we engage in these activities is why we suffer because we do it in ignorance. The whole point of insight is to do all this with knowledge, so that these factors that can lead to suffering can instead become part of the path to the end of suffering. Once you see these activities clearly … 
  12. Healthy Conceit
     … The sort of people they do have a use for are those who see that they’re suffering and who realize that a lot of their sufferings are coming from within—and they want to learn how to stop causing that suffering. In a case like that, you need to have some confidence. If you don’t have the confidence that you can do … 
  13. Choices
     … He uses that word “bewildered” as our normal reaction to suffering. You’re leaving people bewildered because you give them no idea of how to escape from the suffering they’re experiencing right now. You give them no basis even for thinking that there is such a thing as what should be done and what should not be done. After all, if everything you … 
  14. Virtue & Right View
     … thoughts that create suffering now, or even worse—create suffering down the line. There are some forms of practice, the Buddha said, that can be pleasant now but will cause long-term suffering, so watch out for those. There are those that are difficult now but will create well-being further down the line. With those*,* he said you should be willing to put … 
  15. Dispassion & Delight
     … You try to comprehend suffering, and comprehension means that you understand it to the point where there’s no passion, aversion or delusion around it. You try to abandon the cause of suffering, which means that you develop dispassion for the cause. The third noble truth is when you succeed at developing dispassion for the cause. But, then, with the fourth noble truth, the … 
  16. Friends with Pain
     … That chant we had just now, “Those who don’t discern suffering”: You think, “Who in the world doesn’t discern suffering?” We know it, we experience it, but we don’t discern it. That’s the problem. We don’t really look into it. The first thing that happens when pain comes is that we think, “How do you get rid of it … 
  17. A Concentration Diet
     … But even then, as long as the mind is in the position where it has to eat, it’s going to suffer. As the Buddha said, suffering is the five clinging-aggregates, and the word for clinging—upadana—can also mean to take sustenance, to feed. When you’re in a position where you have to feed on things, no matter how good they … 
  18. Three Perceptions
    Three Perceptions August 21, 2007 Almost any book on Buddhism will tell you that the three characteristics — the characteristic of inconstancy, the characteristic of stress or suffering, and the characteristic of not-self — were one of the Buddha’s most central teachings. The strange thing, though, is that when you look in the Pali Canon, the word for “three characteristics,” ti-lakkhana,doesn’t … 
  19. Dealing with Pain
     … Here we are, trying to gain release from suffering, so why are we putting ourselves through pain? Well, even though the word for pain and suffering and stress is the same in Pali—it’s dukkha—the Buddha focused on one particular type of dukkha: not physical pain, mental pain. And the mental pain is caused by our own actions. We hold on to … 
  20. Dispassion Isn’t Depression
     … You already have the skills or lack of skills that are going to determine, when you get the raw materials, what you’re going to do with them and how much suffering or lack of suffering you’ll experience. So here, as part of the path, we’re developing better skills. We’re becoming more sensitive to how we fabricate things. We fabricate them … 
  21. The End of Karma
     … There are places where he said it’s a dimension that’s beyond description, beyond the limits of what words can convey, but he does talk about it to the extent of helping you see that it is very positive, and it’s a place that really is the end of all suffering. And it doesn’t end suffering by snuffing you out. It … 
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