Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Change Your Perceptions… Ask the questions of the four noble truths: “Where is the suffering right now? What am I doing that’s causing the suffering, and how can I stop? How can I abandon that cause?” When you ask those questions, you bring appropriate attention to the breath, because the breath is one of the forms of fabrication that is influenced by ignorance, but it can …
- Being a Buddhist… You’re really going to adopt the Buddha’s point of view, the Buddha’s analysis of how we suffer, why we suffer, and how we can stop. That puts you in a different world and makes you a different person. It gives you more capabilities than you would have had otherwise. There are so many teachings out there that say you can’t …
- Skills for Awakening… The people searching are searching either to get away from suffering or to get toward something that they can use to assuage their suffering. As the Buddha said, all our searches begin from suffering. From pain. We get mystified by pain. You can imagine being a little child with no knowledge of language, so that nobody can explain things to you. You encounter pain …
- A Radiant Practice… In other words, the suffering that weighs down the mind is the suffering that we create for ourselves. The happiness that most uplifts the mind is the goodness we do. That’s merit. You’re looking for happiness in a way that causes no suffering to anyone at all. It’s something you create from within, so its effects go within. And as with …
- Levels of the Breath… The understanding began to arise that if I really wanted to comprehend why I was suffering from those old past narratives, I should try to see how I was causing suffering for myself right now in the present moment. The breath was a good way to explore that. Getting absorbed in the breath is a very important way of getting out of those narratives …
- Truths Noble in the Heart… What is suffering, after all? What is stress – or however you want to translate dukkha? And what is the mind doing that’s giving rise to more stress and more suffering over and over again? Many people will want to look into this problem at some point in their lives. But again, it’s when you take this issue as the primary issue in …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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