Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Respect for the Triple Training… It’s to change your habits, because the habits you’ve got right now are creating suffering. You’re free to continue creating suffering, but why, when the opportunity to stop is there? Sometimes the response to “why” is apathy: You don’t care. Or heedlessness: You’re not really paying attention. Or laziness: You don’t want to be bothered. But you’ve …
- A Seeker’s Habits… It starts from your outside actions and moves on in to the actions of the mind, and finally settles in on the real issue—how the mind does things that cause itself suffering: a suffering that’s not necessary, a stress and a strain, pain, that are really not necessary. When you can learn to see through those habits and abandon those habits, that …
- A Mind Without Inertia… But we’re really attached to the thinking, even though it makes us suffer. We think of passion as a good thing. A lot of people say, how could you live without passion? Think about that for a minute. What does that mean? We need the oomph of passion to overcome an awful lot of inertia. To live is to struggle. We have to …
- Minding Your Own Business… You want to keep things on this level, because this is the basic level that shapes all the pain and suffering or the ease and happiness of our lives. All too often, we focus on the pain and the suffering out there and we don’t stay in touch with the source from which they come: how the body feels in the present moment …
- Step Back & Watch… When my father approached death, he suffered from Parkinson’s and then it developed into Parkinson’s dementia. In his case, he couldn’t tell that his brain was sending him strange perceptions. He believed them. He was in them. When he saw a black dog coming into the living room, it was a black dog in the living room. No two ways about …
- A Strong Mind… What are you doing that’s making the aging, illness, or death have an impact on the mind? What can you do to drop those actions? When you learn how to see the actions of the mind clearly, then you have a lot more control over how much you’re going to suffer or not suffer. And that puts you in a really good …
- Great Expectations… As the Buddha pointed out, there’s just a lot of suffering there in clinging to an identity. Even if you cling to a fluid identity, the fluidity becomes the object that you cling to. So you have to learn how to see all that narratives and any other embroidery that you place on your lust as a form of suffering. The same goes …
- Focus on What You’re Doing… There are the causes for suffering, and there’s the path that leads to the end of suffering. The path doesn’t cause release; it doesn’t cause nibbana. But it takes you there. Those are the two things you want to focus on. What are you doing that’s causing stress? And what are you doing that’s actually helping to alleviate it …
- As Days & Nights Fly Past… Even though they’re inevitable, and potentially very painful, you don’t have to suffer from them. That’s an important point. For most of us, just the idea of aging, illness, and death causes us to suffer. Even more so, the actuality: As you grow old, you find there are things you can’t do anymore. Your body simply won’t let you …
- The Skillful Heart… This is the other lesson of discernment, which is that the suffering that’s weighing down the mind is not being imposed on you from outside. It comes from within. Craving, clinging—these are the things that you’re doing. You’re actually doing the suffering, and not simply passively being subjected to suffering. You’re doing it. You want to see that. Now …
- The Knife of Discernment… These play an important role in how we experience the pain and how we make ourselves suffer unnecessarily from it. So you have to experiment and test things. But first you’ve got to get the mind settled down with a sense of wellbeing, for otherwise it’s going to be sneaking little bites of the pain, feeding on the pain, and then not …
- Inconstancy… That helps you see the connection between anicca and dukkha, or stress and suffering. It’s because things are unreliable that you can’t trust them. You can’t really find any true happiness there. So you have to make yourself more reliable. Years back, when I was with Ajaan Fuang, there was a person in Singapore who had received a copy of one …
- Kind & Happy… People sometimes complain that the Buddha’s teachings on suffering—the four noble truths, the very first teachings he presented—are pessimistic because they focus on the issue of suffering. “Where is the happiness?” they say. Well, if you poke around in the four noble truths, you find happiness there in the fourth truth, which is the path to the end of suffering. That …
- Food, Shelter & Work… So now that you’re fed, sheltered, do the good work of seeing where the mind creates suffering for itself and doesn’t have to. The less suffering you create for yourself, the less of a burden you’ll be for yourself and for others. So it’s good work all around.
- The Unity of the Path… They’re actually preparations for the state of mind you need in order to practice and to accept the fact that the four noble truths, which are the heart of right view, really do focus on the main issue in life, which is that we’re causing suffering and yet we don’t have to. There’s a way in which we can stop …
- High-Level Dhamma… It’s our ability to see what the mind is actually doing to cause itself suffering: That’s where the real Dhamma lies. That’s the first noble truth right there, combined with the second noble truth. If you don’t look at that, there’s no way that the third and fourth noble truths can do their work. So whatever gets served up …
- The Battle of Your Selves… Because when you first read the Buddha’s analysis of suffering, the five clinging-aggregates, first he starts talking about the suffering of birth, aging, illness and death, being separated from what you love, having to be with things you don’t like, not getting what you want. It all sounds very familiar. And he says the five clinging-aggregates are what lie at …
- Strength of Conviction: 2… that he really was able, through his own efforts, to attain the end of suffering, and that the Dhamma he taught was well-taught. In other words, he knew what he was talking about. He was a reliable person, honest and observant—and with very high standards. As he once said, the secret to his awakening was, one, an unwillingness to rest content with …
- Determined on Awakening… But then you suffer the consequences, because your actions do make a difference. That’s the Buddha’s basic teaching. Sometimes you hear that the Buddha didn’t go in for metaphysical truths, yet one metaphysical truth he did go for was the fact that action is real, and you are responsible for your actions. Actions do have consequences, and you can learn from …
- Goodness… We don’t want our happiness to depend on anyone else’s suffering. We start our meditation every day with the chants on goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, to remind us of our motivation for practicing. We want a happiness that’s special, something that’s lasting, something that’s blameless, and at the same time can be a gift to others. Because …
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