Search results for: "Suffering"
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- The World Is Swept Away… This illustrates the second of the three characteristics, the stress and suffering that come along with change — in other words, the natural change of the body. When you’re in pain, you have to suffer it on your own. Then the third characteristic, of not-self: “The world has nothing of its own; one has to pass on leaving everything behind.” The king has …
- The Buddha’s Tools… They keep coming back to suffering and more suffering and more suffering. It’s not a case of laying the blame on anybody. There’s a lot of blame in one-lifetime stories, but when there are thousands of lifetimes, many, many thousands of lifetimes, the whole question of who harmed whom, and who was most outrageous in their harm, loses meaning. What meaning …
- Possessiveness… Harmfulness would be the attitude that you don’t really care whether people suffer or not. You mistreat them not out of ill-will, but simply out of callousness, thinking that they don’t matter or that your own suffering from your own unskillful karma wouldn’t matter. You have to tame these attitudes: Develop thoughts of compassion instead, so that you can get …
- Looking for Happiness Inside… Shortly before he died— he’d been in a bad automobile accident and suffered brain damage—he was commenting that his mind was sending him a lot of strange perceptions, his brain wasn’t functioning properly. But at least he had the mindfulness to know that it was strange and not to fall for whatever the brain was sending him. He stopped for a …
- Determined to Be Undefeated by Death… Now as I often say, when you meditate, you’re preparing how to grow ill, how to age, and how to die without suffering. And that will require the same kind of determination. As we live, we live dependent on strength of body and strength of mind. But strength of body is going to deteriorate, and it does it without asking permission, and it …
- What’s Getting in the Way… What would that be like? What would it be like to really see, as the Buddha says, that the best way to think about suffering is to see it as the act of clinging to the five aggregates. By defining suffering in this way, he’s giving you a handle on how to understand it, how to take it apart. Yet even just these …
- Looking Inward… But if we turn around and look inside, we find that we can deal with the issue of why we’re suffering, and deal with it successfully, because it comes from our own lack of skill. Our experience of the present moment is actually composed of three things: input from past actions; our own present actions, our own present intentions; and then, finally, the …
- Wisdom, Compassion, Purity… being able to use that concentration to see what’s going on in the mind—where you’re causing yourself unnecessary suffering; what you’re doing that’s getting in the way of finding the happiness whose potential lies within. The Buddha wasn’t operating from the position that we’re all basically good or that we’re all basically bad. As you notice …
- Work & Play… To begin with, it gives you a good place to stay so you can actually watch suffering and stress. Our duty with regard to the suffering and stress is to comprehend it. If you feel threatened by it, you’re not going to be able to stay with it long enough to comprehend it. There will always be the wish either to push it …
- Insight Is a Judgment Call… We’re holding on to things that are making us suffer. How do we get released from them? We don’t wait for them to let us go. We learn to let them go. And we do that by passing judgment on what we’re doing as to whether it’s worth doing or not. The Buddha illustrates this with the analogy of a …
- Discernment on the Path… He said he taught suffering and the end of suffering, or stress and the end of stress. We want to comprehend the reality of the suffering so that we can develop the path that leads to the end of stress. The teachings are all aimed at that course of action. Those are the things you want to look for as you meditate: What are …
- Choose Your Cravings Wisely… Some kinds of cravings lead to suffering and others lead to the end of suffering, so you want to recognize which is which.
- A Heart Bigger Than the World… In other words, compassion is what goodwill feels when it sees that people are suffering or creating the causes for suffering. Empathetic joy is what goodwill feels when it sees people happy already or acting on the causes of happiness. But these attitudes have to be backed up by equanimity, remembering that there’s a lot in people’s actions that you cannot change …
- Becomings… The problem is that the cravings taking us to another life are also the cravings that lead to suffering, that cause suffering. There are three altogether. There’s craving for sensuality, craving for more becoming, and then craving for the destruction of whatever becoming you have. All three of these can take you to places you may not want to go. On the one …
- Your World to Practice In… Things incline more and more inside, which is where they belong—because after all, where’s the problem of suffering? It’s inside. Where’s the cause of suffering? It’s inside. The solution is also inside. So you want to stay close to inside, right here. This connects with the final element of creating a good environment: having right view, remembering that what …
- Practicing Your Scales… Why is there suffering? Why do people create suffering for themselves when they want happiness? What can they do to learn to put an end to that suffering? And he focused on that issue in a way that’s still very relevant thousands of years later. As for the Sangha, he instituted an order where people live totally on gifts. The Buddha’s teaching …
- Meaningful Freedom… And if that’s the case, then there’s no practice to put an end to suffering. People suffer and they’re left bewildered by their suffering. They’re defenseless, unprotected.” Urges come up in the mind, and they have no reason to think that they can say No to them. Yet so much of the practice is just that: Something comes into the …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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