Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. Initiative
     … Of course you prefer gaining freedom from suffering over suffering. But whatever you have to do to get there, you’re not going to let your preferences get in the way. You don’t say, “Well, I don’t like doing that. That sounds too hard for me or too harsh for me.” You do what needs to be done. As long as your … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. Grief & Regret
     … Everybody in the world suffers from these things. There are many cases in the Canon of people who are suffering from the loss of someone they loved, and the Buddha’s way of helping them get over that is to remind them that this has happened many, many times to us before and it’s happened to everybody else in the world. No matter … 
  7. The Buddha’s Questions
     … He traced the suffering he was feeling—the aging, illness, and death he was trying to get past—back through his intentions, and from there all the way back to ignorance. In this case, it turned out to be ignorance of what he later taught as the four noble truths: suffering, its origination, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. What was he … 
  8. Fabricating Goodwill
     … Ill-will is the desire that somebody else suffer. Anger may alert you to a problem, but ill-will has no uses at all. You can think of anger as an alarm bell. When an alarm bell goes off, you don’t need it to keep ringing. You turn off the alarm so that you can think clearly about what needs to be done … 
  9. Unskillful Habits
     … the suffering we create for ourselves. That’s the issue. The suffering coming from outside was not the main issue. It is an issue, but because we pile on our own suffering inside, we make it more and more difficult to deal properly with the outside stuff. So straightening out our own mind is not a question of laying the blame on us. It … 
  10. Happiness Without Conflict
     … So we’re training our desires so that we that can change our intentions, where we look for happiness, and change our attention, how we look at things, so that, instead of leading to more suffering, our intentions and our attention lead away from suffering. This, in Ajaan Fuang’s terms, is where the blame lies: the way we act on certain intentions and … 
  11. Intelligent Restraint
     … You can avoid a lot of suffering that way. That would be the Buddha’s definition of your intelligence: knowing how to stop creating the suffering that you’ve been creating for so long.
  12. Selves with Skills
     … The main issue is actually in the four noble truths, starting with the fact that we suffer in our clinging, we cling because of craving, and we crave because of ignorance. However, it is possible to put an end to that ignorance, put an end to that craving, by following the path. These are truths that carry duties: The suffering is to be comprehended … 
  13. The Range of Our Responsibility
     … The thinking that encourages you to stay with the breath, the thinking that finds the breath interesting, wants to know more about the breath, wants to know more about what’s going on in the mind, why it is that even though we want happiness, we do things that cause suffering: That kind of thinking, that kind of inquisitiveness is really encouraged. It’s … 
  14. Strength of Mindfulness
     … In terms of purity of view, you want to remember that the real suffering that weighs the mind down does come from inside. Things outside may get bad, but you don’t have to suffer from them. You keep that in mind, which means again, that you turn your energies to training the mind. You train your desire, your effort, your diligence, your endeavor … 
  15. Experimental Intelligence
     … the fact that there is suffering, that there’s a cause for suffering, that suffering can cease, and that there’s a path of practice leading to its cessation. These truths in turn relate to a more basic issue: that the whole purpose of the Buddha’s teachings is for the sake of finding true happiness. And he brings both the heart and the … 
  16. Goodwill as Right View
     … What are they but an expression of goodwill? Taking everybody’s suffering as the big issue and showing how we can all put an end to our suffering: Goodwill is what the Buddha depended on to teach, to go out of his way to establish the Dhamma and Vinaya. Ordinarily, a teaching Buddha has only one duty, which is to teach his contemporaries how … 
  17. Right View Tells You What to Do
     … It points out the actions you do that lead to suffering, and the actions you can do to put an end to suffering. And its purpose is to take you to something beyond right view. There’s a passage where Anathapindika goes out in the morning. It’s too early to go see the Buddha, so he decides to stop by and see some … 
  18. Focus on Your Intention
     … In the same way, when we claim these aggregates and turn them into our sense of ourselves, or things belonging to us, we’re going to weigh ourselves down, to suffer. The way out of this dilemma is to change our intentions. We take those same potentials and we can turn them into a path, a path to the end of suffering. This is … 
  19. True Honesty
     … your unskillful actions, the ones that cause suffering. This is why the Buddha’s teachings focus on the four noble truths, because they’re right there in our actions: what we do that causes suffering, what we could do to stop suffering. Recently I’ve been reading some Dhamma talks where the teacher seems to think that the great part of honesty is to … 
  20. Freedom Undefined
     … Then, when you notice that what you’re doing is causing suffering to yourself or other people, you have the tools to change those habits. If the classic tools don’t work, you can use your own ingenuity to extrapolate on them. When you find that that captures your imagination, then the difficulties don’t really impress themselves on your mind. The whole purpose … 
  21. Investing Your Happiness
     … People often complain about how the four noble truths focus on suffering, but if you look at them carefully you see that the most important of them is the fourth truth, the path to the end of suffering. It’s the first one the Buddha taught. It’s the one truth that contains all four noble truths right there in Right View. At its … 
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