Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Firm in Your Intent… You’re trying to look to see what the mind is doing that’s causing suffering, which is why you have to stick with the duties of the four noble truths. Wherever you recognize the clinging you’re engaging in, you try to comprehend it. Exactly how is the act of clinging the same thing as suffering? As for the craving that gives rise …
- The Mirror Inside… Well, what’s coming into your senses all at once is not causing you to suffer. What’s causing you to suffer is your own actions, which is why the Buddha says to focus there—on what you’re doing. Be alert to what you’re doing. When engaged in evaluation—vicāra—you’re evaluating your actions. When you’re moving into what the …
- Hope… In addition, the Pali language has ways of formulating injunctions where you express a hope: “May this happen, may this not happen.” In fact, the whole purpose of the teaching is to give rise to hope that, whatever you’re suffering from, there is a way out of that suffering and there’s a way to put a total end to all suffering. So …
- Don’t Get Discouraged… We all want happiness but we’ve got to face these things in life, and we have to learn how to deal with them in such a way that we don’t suffer. That’s what the meditation is for. As the phrase goes, “Pain is normal but the suffering is optional.” Physical pain is going to be there for everybody, in one way …
- At Home in Jhana… You haven’t understood properly how you take the raw materials you have here and create suffering out of them. And you haven’t realized that you don’t need to create that suffering. You can create a sense of ease and well-being instead. You take these raw materials you’ve been carrying around as loads and you place them down in the …
- Fear of the Truth… This is why comprehending suffering, letting go of the cause of suffering, requires developing the path—because this is not just a path. It’s also a fortress, a safe place, a strong place. When the mind is well-endowed with mindfulness, concentration, and discernment, it really can handle these things. Greed comes up and you can see right through it. Anger comes up …
- Responsible for Your Actions… Wouldn’t you rather be responsible, in light of the impact that our actions actually have on our own happiness and the happiness of the people around us? If we look for happiness that’s dependent on making other people suffer, it’s not going to last. If you want happiness that lasts, you’ve got to take responsibility both for the things you …
- Neither Here nor There… The cravings, of course, are the cause of suffering. They’re precisely what we need to study if we want to get past suffering. We have to understand cravings so that we can abandon them. If you look simply at the suffering without going to craving and understanding it, you’ll never get done with it. You’ve got to attack the problem at …
- Questioning Your Unconscious Actions… In other words, when they’re unskillful, when they’re done through ignorance, they’ve got you primed to suffer no matter what comes to your senses—no matter what you see or hear or smell or taste or touch or think about. Once these little decisions are in place, they’ve got you primed to suffer. Now, if you can bring awareness and …
- 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 …
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