Search results for: "Suffering"

  1. Page 86
  2. Beyond Inter-eating
     … What are they like? When you’re feeding on physical food you’re feeding on the suffering of others. Even if you’re vegetarian, you’re feeding off of the sweat of the brow of the people who have to work to get that food eventually to your plate. The food of sensory contact, he says, is like a constant barrage of insects on … 
  3. The Kamma of Meditation
     … Actions done under the influence of unskillful intentions, based on greed, aversion, and delusion, tend to lead to suffering. Actions done without the influence of greed, aversion and delusion tend to lead to happiness. Right there is where the Buddha’s teachings are important, different even from those who did teach kamma in the past. There were groups of people who said that your … 
  4. Bless Yourself
     … There are desires that can lead to suffering; there are desires that can lead to the end of suffering. The Buddha deals with the problem that you feel within—suffering—but he also says the cause of the problem is also within. And the ability to put an end the problem by attacking the causes: That comes from within, too. So his awakening was … 
  5. Strength of Persistence
    One of the lessons of the four noble truths is that we suffer largely because of the way we talk to ourselves, and we can learn not to suffer by learning to talk to ourselves in new ways. This point applies especially to the question of right effort or persistence. You look at what’s required by the path, and if all you can … 
  6. Not Resolved on Self
     … Heedful, in the sense that you see how important it is to act in skillful ways—that if your actions are unskillful, there’s going to be suffering. If you’re more skillful, you can avoid a lot of unnecessary suffering. You want to take that principle to heart. And it should inspire you to be ardent. This is basically related to right effort … 
  7. Doubt
     … that you do have choice in the present moment, and your choices will make the difference between whether you’re happy or you suffer, and there’s a pattern to all this that you can learn. If you really care for happiness, these are some of the things you’ve got to take on faith at the beginning. The Buddha can’t prove them … 
  8. Pleasure & Pain
     … Now, if you’re really suffering from it, it’s hard to get in a position where you can be cool and collected enough to comprehend pain, which is why pleasure has its role in the path—not sensual pleasure, but the pleasure of a concentrated mind. As the Buddha once said, right concentration is the heart of the path. And one of the … 
  9. The Pleasure Principle Made Noble
    After the Buddha-to-be had practiced austerities and realized he’d come to a dead end, he cast around in his mind for other possible ways of finding an end to suffering. He remembered the time when he was young when he’d spontaneously entered the first jhāna, and he asked himself, Could that be the way to awakening? And something inside said … 
  10. Nourishing & Interesting
     … After all, where is the cause of suffering? It comes from within. There are the desires that go off in the wrong direction, but there are also desires that go in the right direction, and you’ve got to learn to figure out which is which. This is how the mind works: It’s not just sitting there, passively receiving information through the senses … 
  11. Being Right
     … You know in your heart of hearts that you’re suffering and you need to work on the cause of suffering, and it’s not going to happen by hanging around with friends. It’s going to happen by digging down into your own mind and following the path. You have to take that as your first priority. As for your relationships with other … 
  12. The Creator of Worlds
     … Conversely, you can be in a lot of pain in the present moment but not suffer at all, again, depending on what you’ve brought from the past, how you’re constructing your world right now. So as we’re on the path to practice, we’re creating a different world. Ultimately, we go beyond this need to create worlds for ourselves. But there … 
  13. Bigger than the World
     … Some of them lead to suffering and some of them lead away. You don’t want the suffering. It is okay to have some preferences here. If you didn’t have preferences, you wouldn’t be meditating. But you want to look at these things as processes so as to get out of the stories. You can see that there’s the breath, there … 
  14. Views, Virtue, & Mindfulness
     … With straightened-out views, you have to remember that the suffering you’re experiencing right now is an important issue. That’s the problem. Also, remember that the suffering that weighs down on the mind comes from within the mind itself. If there’s going to be a solution, it has to come from within the mind as well. That’s all part of … 
  15. The Buddha’s Cure
     … One is called symptom management, when you try to calm down the symptoms that are making the patient suffer, but you may not be getting to the root of the disease. That’s why you need the second step, which is the total cure—where you actually attack the disease at its cause. In the practice of the Dhamma and in meditation, we have … 
  16. Exercising the Mind
     … It may give you a slightly different perspective on things, but it’s not the kind of knowledge that comes with knowing that you’ve done something and you’ve suffered from it, or haven’t suffered from it, or you’ve been able to lift a burden from the mind by doing something in a particular way. That kind of knowledge sticks with … 
  17. Criticism
    The basic premise of the four noble truths is that we’re suffering because we’re doing something wrong. But we can learn, we can do it right. We learn from people who’ve learned how to do it right themselves—which is one of the reasons why criticism is such an important part of the training, because sometimes you can’t see your … 
  18. Learning Through Healing
     … It’s because we fabricate based on ignorance that we suffer. So in the course of treating the mind, we’re going to learn a lot about fabrication. We’ll learn a lot about the impact the mind has on the breath, the impact the breath has on the mind; the way the breath can fashion your sense of the body and then the … 
  19. Attached to the Body
     … That’s why we suffer: the mind’s ability to create blind spots. Just the way surgeons can open up bodies and then go back home and sleep with their wives, or their husbands or whatever, and compartmentalize reality. What they saw on the operating table has nothing to do with how they live the rest of their lives. And yet it’s because … 
  20. Cornered
     … We have to stay in this sitting position and the difference between suffering right now and having a sense of ease and well-being right now is going to depend on your own inner resources: the way you fabricate your experience right now. As they say, necessity becomes the mother of invention. What are you going to do? Well, you’ve got Ajaan Lee … 
  21. Conceit Defanged
     … If you can use that sense of “I am” to remind yourself that “I am* *suffering, but I am capable of putting an end to suffering and capable of learning from the good examples around me,” then you’ve defanged your conceit and found a good use for it.
  22. Load next page...