Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. The Five Aggregates
     … The more you cling to them, the more you suffer. They’re not at fault. It’s your clinging that’s at fault. They in and of themselves are perfectly fine. If you were to ask the body, “Do you want to stay alive?” The body’s indifferent. If you were asking feelings, “Would you rather be pleasant or painful?” The feelings are indifferent … 
  3. Meditation as a Skill
     … There’s a cessation to suffering, total end of suffering. It’s not annihilation, but it does lie outside your normal realm of experience. He mentions that because he wants to capture your imagination. If you don’t imagine that such thing is a possibility, you’ll never get there. It’s like shooting a gun: You never hit any higher than you aim … 
  4. The Size of Your Eyes
     … stress and suffering. Skillful causes or skillful actions, like the path, lead to a desirable result: the end of suffering. They’re all about doing. When we do mindfulness practice, the qualities we develop are ardency, alertness, and mindfulness—and the wisdom is there in the ardency: trying to do it right, figuring out what’s skillful, what’s unskillful and how to do … 
  5. Dhamma Survivalism
    One of the ironies of Buddhism coming to the West is that sometimes you hear the Buddha described as extolling interconnectedness and celebrating the Oneness of all being, even though, as he actually pointed out, the extent to which we’re interconnected is very unstable and, because it’s unstable, it’s a cause for suffering. As for Oneness, he said there are levels … 
  6. Heedful of Death
     … The reason that people suffer as they get sick, and suffer as they die, is that the mind will latch on to something that, in many cases, is pretty random. It has to do with their past kamma, things that suddenly pop up at that moment. And because the mind is weak and feels threatened, it’ll just latch on because it’s not … 
  7. Concentration & Insight
     … The big drawback is the stress and suffering caused by these thoughts. The Buddha’s use of the word dukkha covers both suffering and stress, because there is stress even in the states of concentration, and that is what you’ll have to focus on to get past the concentration. But first you want to focus on the grosser forms of suffering. This is … 
  8. What’s Important
     … After all, the Buddha discovered that we suffer because of things inside the mind, and in the course of suffering, we tend to create burdens for other people. One of our wishes for goodwill is, “May I look after myself with ease. May all beings look after themselves with ease.” In other words, “May they not be burdens. May I not be a burden … 
  9. Endurance
     … If you carry around stories about what this person did, what that person did, and how much you’ve been suffering since who knows when, and you’re gathering all the suffering together and putting it in the bag as you go down the field, then endurance is going to be hard. Goodwill is going to be hard. But if you don’t carry … 
  10. Peace vs. Clinging
     … Just as the Buddha has many meanings for sukha, he also has many meanings for its opposite, *dukkha: *stress, suffering, pain, dis-ease. He starts out by illustrating different types of dukkha that we’re all familiar with, and then he gets to the essence. We’re familiar with birth, aging, illness, and death, being separated from things we like, having to live with … 
  11. Introduction to the Breath
     … We have our ability to act, we have our ability to train our actions so that we don’t keep causing suffering for ourselves. We all want happiness, yet one of the big paradoxes in life is that we interfere with our own ability to maintain a sense of well-being. We actively create suffering for ourselves, stress for ourselves when we don’t … 
  12. The Stakes Are High
     … But he was able to gain awakening so that he didn’t have to suffer from those past actions. The suffering he had was minimal. People were still upset that he’d basically gotten away with murder. Sometimes, when he was on his alms round, they would throw things at him. One time he came back from his alms round with a big gash … 
  13. Think Like a Thief
     … He saw connections that nobody else has ever pointed out to him, connections between craving, ignorance, and stress and suffering. All those connections of dependent co-arising are things he observed because he thought like a thief, didn’t expect the truth to be handed to him on a platter. The thing is the truth is there, to be seen at all times, if … 
  14. Outside the Box
     … You’re here because you’re suffering. You want to put end to suffering, so you’re inquisitive. If you’re not inquisitive and you simply say, “Okay, I’ll apply these perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not self to whatever comes up,” how do you know that you’re not indoctrinating yourself? You’ve inclined the mind to see things in that way … 
  15. Straightening Out the World
     … As Ajaan Lee once said, there are two types of suffering in the world: the suffering that’s natural, that simply comes with part of having a body; and then the suffering that’s not natural, that comes from our defilements. What is a defilement? It’s something that clouds the mind. It’s like a cloud that comes in front of the Sun … 
  16. The Stages of Meditation
     … And you get a quicker and quicker at sensing which is which, which ones lead to happiness and which ones will lead to suffering. You can start undercutting the ones that lead to suffering, step by step by step. You gain more control of the mind and see exactly where it’s getting in the way of the happiness you’re trying to find … 
  17. Bases for Success
     … Right view in seeing that the training of the mind is going to make the difference between suffering and not suffering. Right resolve: You decide you want to find happiness in a way that doesn’t involve sensuality, doesn’t involve ill will, doesn’t involve any harmfulness. You’ve got it right here with the concentration. Right speech in this case would be … 
  18. Normalcy
     … It’s normally been creating suffering, but you can see a deeper state of normalcy, a state of true well-being that’s very, very subtle, which comes when you’re not creating suffering anymore. So you’ve got to see the normal habits of the mind that have been creating suffering before you can undo them, let go of them. Only then can … 
  19. Feeding While You Work
     … These two modes of the mind are very much related to the issue of suffering. In the four noble truths, there’s a cause and there’s an effect. There’s either craving and the suffering that comes from craving, or else there’s the factors of the path and the freedom from suffering that comes from developing the factors of the path. You … 
  20. Awaken to Your Potentials
     … As the Buddha said, there is a potential for a path to the end of suffering even in those aggregates that are inconstant, stressful, not self. You can put them together in such a way that they deliver you to places beyond them. That’s what awakening is all about. The path to awakening is like a ladder that you build up to the … 
  21. Disenchantment & Dispassion
     … This is how we continue creating suffering for ourselves. Our whole experience of the six sense-spheres, five khandhas: When you get into the details of these things, you see how much you’re doing to create them. The experience of the khandhas is shaped by fabrication, sankhara. You’re aware of the six senses because you direct your attention there. Sometimes you direct … 
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