Search results for: "Suffering"
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- The Intelligent Heart… The fathers, the sisters, the brothers, the sons and daughters who you’ve loved very strongly, but that relationship didn’t save you from having to come back and suffer again and again and be separated from them again and again. So we’re trying to develop a mature heart, an intelligent heart, one that realizes that suffering has its causes, and the causes …
- Strength for Your Goodness… There are a lot of people in the world who are suffering, and if you behave in a skillful way, you can help to alleviate that suffering, both for yourself and for others. Sometimes you feel inspired by stories of the great teachers of the past. Again, you think about the Buddha’s example, the example of all the noble disciples: men and women …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- Inner Baggage… One of the basic ways we have of creating suffering for ourselves is this division we make between the physical and the mental, what they call nāma and rūpa. I once saw a cartoon of a meditator. First, she’s sitting there perfectly still, and then the word “think” appears across her forehead. In the next frame, there’s “think” in her shoulder, “think …
- A Mind Like Earth… But the work of putting an end to suffering really does have an end point. So keep that in mind: that you’re working toward something that does come to an end, that brings about an end to all suffering. If you’re not on this path, you’re just going to be wandering around in the wilderness, totally aimless: That’s endless. So …
- Useful Thinking… Why are we focusing on the present moment? Because the way we fabricate the present moment is causing suffering. We want to be able to see that clearly, see both where the suffering or the stress is—because sometimes it’s blatant and sometimes it’s more subtle—and to see the fabrication of what we’re doing. So that’s why we’re …
- Resources for Endurance… This is why, for instance, when we’re practicing here, we know that an important part of the practice is learning how to comprehend suffering. But then you look the path, and it’s not all suffering. You have right concentration, which provides a sense of ease, a sense of rapture. You learn how to develop these things so that you have strengths to …
- A Slave to Craving… We look at suffering or pain as an enemy. And we look at craving as our friend. When suffering comes, we push it away or we run away from it. But when craving comes, we tend to tag along. There’s a sutta where the Buddha says that everywhere we go, we go with craving as our companion. So we think that craving is …
- An Auspicious Day… You realize that you have certain duties—duties that are not forced on you by anyone, but you realize that if you find yourself creating unnecessary stress and suffering for yourself and you’d like to stop, there are certain things you’ve got to do. You’ve got to see where the stress is, you have to comprehend it; you have to see …
- Duties… And in meeting those needs, we have to depend on the suffering of others for our food, our clothing, our shelter, medicine. We have that chant every night to think about these things. And now society has come to a halt, come to a pause, we can begin to see clearly how dependent we are on the suffering of a lot of beings just …
- Dispassion Is Freedom… The duty with regard to the first truth, suffering, which is clinging to the aggregates: You have to comprehend that, and part of comprehension is getting past passion for them. The duty with regard to craving—the cause of suffering—is that you’ve got to abandon it. How do you abandon it? By developing dispassion. The third noble truth itself is dispassion. It …
- Metta… You want to be careful about your actions so that you don’t actively cause suffering or harm to others. This is why goodwill is coupled with those other brahmaviharas: compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. Compassion is what goodwill feels on seeing people who are suffering, or who are doing actions that would cause suffering. Notice one of those phrases in the chant just …
- Two Roads to the Grand Canyon… The question always is, “Does that experience really put an end to suffering?” You have to look again and again and again to see what levels of suffering remain because we’re not here for status. We’re here to cure these really bad habits we have of creating stress and suffering for ourselves when we don’t really have to.
- Seriously Happy… Compassion is what goodwill feels when it sees people who actually are suffering. You want them to be able to escape from their suffering. Empathetic joy is what goodwill feels when it sees people who are already happy. Those three are expressed with, “May”: May all beings be happy. May they be released from suffering. May they not be deprived of the good fortune …
- Truth… He would look at his actions and ask himself, “Am I suffering?” When the answer was Yes, the next question was, “What am I doing that might be causing that suffering?” He had to look honestly at what he was doing and the results that he was getting. Then he had to ask himself, “Is there an alternative way of doing this? Is this …
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