Search results for: "Suffering"
- Page 78
- Start with Yourself… If you see someone suffering, you want to stop their suffering. If you see them doing the causes for suffering, you want to find a way to help them stop. Not by doing away with them but by helping them understand what the results of their actions will be. So we have these phrases that we chant night after night after night. “May all …
- Significance… comprehending suffering, abandoning its cause—the cause there, of course, would be an unskillful action; developing the path, which is a skillful action; and realizing the cessation of suffering. Everything you need to know lies under those duties. That’s the main framework you want to keep in mind. And as I said, staying with the breath, staying in the present moment, trying to …
- Lust… Without this work, you stay stuck in your old ways, suffering in the same old way over and over and over again. As the Buddha says, the amount of suffering remaining for someone who hasn’t seen the Dhamma is like all the water in the oceans of the earth, whereas the amount of suffering remaining for someone who has seen the Dhamma, has …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… When you see that there’s something in your mind is causing suffering, you want to find a way to let go of the cause and to develop the factors that help you overcome that suffering. You want to find a way to delight in these projects, because if it’s just plain old work and drudgery, you won’t last. You can force …
- Can All Beings Be Happy?… When you see beings are suffering, you want them to be released from their suffering—that’s basically applying goodwill in a way that turns it into compassion. And empathetic joy is goodwill applied to cases where you see people are already happy, “May they continue to be happy. May they continue to develop the causes for happiness.” You’re not resentful of their …
- Useful Vocabulary… In other words, the suffering will still be there. It may be very subtle, but it’s still there. And as long as there’s that potential for suffering, you can’t really trust your mind, because it might stick with a particularly large perception of an awareness that’s located nowhere. You’re stuck on the perception. But then after a while, you …
- Calm in the Storm… As I said, if you do these things in ignorance, they lead to suffering, but if you do them with knowledge, they can actually become part of the path to the end of suffering. So as you’re meditating on the breath, you begin to notice that you’re learning not only about the breath, but also about the mind as the mind talks …
- Lift Up Your Mind… What does that mean? It means that you respect the human ability to do good—and not only to do good, but through human action to put an end to suffering. That’s something we should find inspiring. If you look at the news these days, human behavior is not all that inspiring, but of course it depends on where you look. It’s …
- The Mind Isn’t Hot… If you make that distinction, the mind doesn’t have to suffer with these things. In fact, he went into very deep concentration. The problem is that we go out and lay claim to things. Then when they start getting unpleasant, they start seeping into the mind. The mind suffers. So today the weather is hot. Tomorrow they’re promising even hotter weather. And …
- Faith in the Buddha… What the Buddha said about suffering is in many ways counterintuitive. Suffering is clinging. And the word for clinging in Pali, upadana, can also mean taking sustenance, i.e., feeding. And for most of us, we get so much pleasure in life feeding emotionally and physically that the idea that this would be what suffering is goes against the grain. We can’t imagine …
- The Will to Awaken… And then when you look at what qualities need to be developed in order to put an end to suffering, you find that they’re also qualities required to improve your discernment. You need to develop more mindfulness, more alertness, more concentration. And part of that quest for the end of suffering involves goodwill—goodwill for yourself, goodwill for the people around you—because …
- Isolating the Aggregates… This is why, when you’ve been practicing concentration and you’re beginning to look at the issue of suffering, you begin to see more clearly how clinging to these five aggregates is what brings suffering about. You’re clinging to any one of these five activities or any combination of them—because they are activities. We call them aggregates, which makes them sound …
- Events as Events… Wherever there’s a sense of stress or suffering, you try to comprehend it to see what it is that you’re clinging to. When you see what you’re clinging to, you figure out what’s causing you to cling, and that’s craving. You comprehend the clinging and try to abandon the craving so that you can realize the end of suffering …
- Non-Reactive Judgment… There are causes of suffering that respond to simply looking at them with equanimity, but there are others that respond only when you fabricate a fabrication. And to master both of those approaches, you’ve got to develop good powers of concentration. Think about the Buddha’s teachings on equanimity. There’s ordinary equanimity, which is what we start out with. That’s the …
- Single-minded Determination… Not only is a lot of effort wasted in creating that happiness, but sometimes in order to maintain it you also start doing things that go against the precepts, that go against the principles of morality, concentration, and discernment, so that your conditioned happiness causes suffering not only in passing away but also in leading to all kinds of bad things down the road …
- The Fabrication of Pain… You have to be always coming from a state of well-being, always coming from a place where you feel, “This pain does not have to make me suffer.” Then you let the energy flow. The way you picture the energy to yourself will depend on the different kind of pains. Sometimes the energy has to come from the spot where you focus. Sometimes …
- Exploring What You’ve Got… Look at the Buddha’s analysis of suffering, dependent co-arising. We’re all starting out of ignorance. From ignorance we create ideas about things: This should be that way, that should be this way—and so on up through the cycle. The important point that’s going to make a big difference, though, is when you get to the factor called “name and …
- A Tale of Two Kings… But the Buddha points out that it is possible through our actions to put an end to suffering. That changes the equation. It’s no longer a matter of personal preference. The question is: Here this opportunity is there. Are you not going to take advantage of it? Otherwise, you’ll just keep coming back to the same old suffering, having to accept the …
- Goodwill as Wealth… Ask yourself if there’s anybody out there for whom you have ill-will, someone you’d like to see suffer. And then ask yourself, “Well, what would you gain from that? What would the world gain from that?” Part of the mind might say, “Well, if they suffer maybe they’ll come to their senses.” But people very rarely change for the better …
- The Path Has a Goal… I was reading a while back about a teacher who said he wouldn’t want to live in a world without suffering because he wouldn’t then be able to exercise his compassion — which is a very selfish wish: You want there to be people who are suffering so that you can enjoy being compassionate to them? Your sense of wellbeing needs to feed …
- Load next page...
