Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. The Third Noble Truth
    The Third Noble Truth February 22, 2015 Of the four noble truths, the third—the cessation of suffering and stress—is the one we talk about the least, the reason being that it’s the result of the practice. Focus on the causes, and the results will take care of themselves. So most of our emphasis is on the path. But it’s good … 
  3. One Thing Clear Through
     … What are they motivated by if not goodwill? The desire for an end of suffering, the desire for happiness that doesn’t place any burdens on anyone else: What is this if not compassion? And look at his teaching career. Wherever there was anyone ready to learn the Dhamma, he would go there. In those days, that meant going on foot. He traveled all … 
  4. Doing the Right Thing
     … You look in the mind to see what you’re doing that’s creating suffering. You realize that it’s the craving and ignorance that you’re doing. We don’t think of these as actions, but they are. We tend to think of them as qualities that kind of hover around the mind like a cloud, but they’re choices that we make … 
  5. When Aging Closes In
     … Ajaan Suwat, after he’d had his car accident and was suffering some brain damage, could still tell when the brain was giving him wrong information and when it was not. That was the result of his training. One of Ajaan Fuang’s students was a middle-aged man who had to go in for a heart operation. When he came out, he realized … 
  6. The Taste vs. the Reality
     … Remind yourself that when suffering comes, it’s real. After all, it’s a noble truth, and it really is painful, it really does hurt. And as for the anguish of the mind that’s stuck in a particular situation, you’re outside of those situations right now, so don’t let yourself slip back in. This is why the Buddha says we should … 
  7. Be Heedful & Think
     … You’ve been allowing yourself to think in ways that lead to suffering, and you’ve been doing it for so long that you don’t really see the connection between what you’re doing and the suffering, because the suffering is so constant. But if you learn how to be careful, then when a desire comes into the mind, you can ask yourself … 
  8. Evaluation
     … But what you can change is how you respond to all that, and the extent to which you actually make yourself suffer from other people’s lack of skill. The big message of the four noble truths is that the suffering that weighs down the mind comes from your own actions. This is a message that some people find depressing—it means they have … 
  9. Circumspection
     … It does prefer not-suffering to suffering, so much so that it’s not going to side with a particular action unless it really does lead to the end of suffering. And it’ll want to check things from many angles to make sure that it’s judgments are accurate. It’s through this ability to look at things from many different perspectives that … 
  10. Safety
     … That’s what’s shaping things, and that’s what primes you to suffer. We do these activities in ignorance. And because it’s in ignorance, we don’t know what we’re doing. That’s why we suffer. But if you could learn how to do these things with knowledge, then no matter how bad the contact is at the senses—and that … 
  11. Determined Goodwill
     … It’s just that if you harbor ill will for anybody, you’re going to do unskillful things and then suffer the consequences. So for your own protection, you have to think thoughts of goodwill in all situations. That’s the first aspect of a good determination: using discernment in choosing your motivation, your means, and the goal you’re aiming at. You want … 
  12. The Middle Way
     … The main point of the four noble truths is that the cause of suffering is inside, and the suffering itself is something you’re doing. Clinging-aggregates are not just things sitting around. The compound means the act of clinging to the aggregates, and it’s related to craving, which is the origination, and which also comes from the mind. Both the craving and … 
  13. Patience & Endurance
     … For goodwill, compassion, and empathetic joy, it starts, “May all beings be happy, may they be free from suffering, may they not be deprived of the good fortune they have obtained.” In other words, “may, may, may.” Whereas with equanimity, it’s a statement of fact: “All beings are the owners of their actions.” When I was in France a couple weeks back, I … 
  14. Sowing Good Seeds
     … You don’t have to cause yourself that kind of suffering anymore. When you’re not causing yourself that kind of suffering, you’re not causing other people that kind of suffering either. So the meditation is like a seed. You plant the seed of staying with the breath, of being mindful, being alert, being persistent, and it grows into a greater and greater … 
  15. No Dharma Without Karma
     … people who want to be told that the reason they’re suffering has nothing to do with them. It’s somebody else’s fault. They’re miserable because someone taught them to fear the world or fear their desires, whereas all you have to do is realize that the world is basically good as it is, your desires are perfectly fine, and you just … 
  16. In Training
     … The four noble truths come down basically to what kind of kamma leads to suffering and what kind of kamma leads to the end of suffering. More detailed instructions, like dependent co-arising, place a lot of emphasis on the factors that occur prior to your sensory contact. In other words, it’s not just the case that you see something nice and it … 
  17. Look Around as You Follow the Trail
     … The immediate purpose of the path is to help you abandon craving, and you want to abandon craving because it’s causing suffering. It’s causing you to latch on and cling to things. That’s the suffering. The Buddha’s genius—or at least part of it—was that he saw how the way to the unconditioned is to focus on the problem … 
  18. How to Feed Mindfulness
     … The practice of meditation is learning how to put aside the unskillful potentials, how to develop the skillful ones, and how to take advantage of the skillful ones—learning how to feed them, to give them strength, so that they basically take charge and help put an end to suffering and stress. You could, if you wanted to, sit here and spend the whole … 
  19. Doing
    One of the purposes of the meditation is to get to see what the mind is doing, because what the mind is doing can either create happiness or create suffering. In fact, as the Buddha pointed out, that’s the big problem in life: the fact that the mind usually acts for the purpose of creating happiness, but it ends up creating just the … 
  20. The Mind When Trained Brings Happiness
     … Yet the Buddha says you can actually prepare for these things so that you don’t have to suffer from them. And the main thing that prevents us from suffering is having the mind trained so that it doesn’t go looking for happiness in all the wrong places. You may have noticed how much we bow down around here. You may wonder why … 
  21. Question Your Defilements
     … When the Buddha talks about the path, when he talks about the causes of suffering and stress, they’re all things that are very present in our minds right now. They’re all possibilities we can develop: either the possibility for more stress and suffering, or the possibility for less. So try to expand your imagination and start questioning the things coming up in … 
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