Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Customs of the Noble Ones
     … If they want you to be fearful, they can threaten you: “You’re going to suffer from hardships. You’re going to suffer from lack. Things are going to become scarce and more expensive.” So one way of getting out of the control of customs based on defilement is learning how to be content with just enough to practice. It’s your expression of … 
  3. A Meditation Karma Checklist
     … He teaches karma to the extent that it’s useful in getting the mind to be trained so that it can put an end to suffering. That’s as far as his teaching goes, but that’s pretty far. It’s much better than having a map to everything but still suffering. So use these teachings to take you where you want to go … 
  4. Skills to Take Home
     … The Buddha’s teaching on skillfulness, his explanation of how suffering is caused and how it can be put to an end: These things are constant. They don’t depend on the culture; they don’t depend on the time or place. So you start by holding to that. You try to keep your precepts pure, keep your views straight—in other words, understanding … 
  5. The Desire to End All Desires
     … When the Buddha said that craving was the cause of suffering, many people think that he meant all kinds of craving and all kinds of desire are bad. But that’s not what he said. He specified three kinds of craving as causing suffering. But he also assigned the desire to be skillful and the desire to avoid unskillful behavior to the factor of … 
  6. Attachment to Views
     … He realized that neither of those knowledges in and of itself was going to put an end to suffering. So he looked into them to see what kind of lesson could be drawn from them that will help put an end to suffering. And he noticed that once he saw the connection between actions and the pleasure and pain that you’re going to … 
  7. Heedfulness All the Way Through
     … What’s the heedful thing to do with that? You your discernment to see where you’re creating unnecessary stress, unnecessary suffering for yourself, right there in the concentration. The Buddha talks about what he calls “five-factored noble concentration.” The first four factors are the four jhanas; the fifth one is the ability to step back from what you’re doing and observe … 
  8. Goodwill Without Limits
     … So try to lift both the heart and the mind to a Brahma level, where you can see that you don’t gain any benefit from anybody’s suffering at all. We read about investors saying that the economy is such that we have to inflict a little bit of pain on other people, so that we can gain what we want. Well, that … 
  9. Make the Most of What You’ve Got
     … This relates to the word “becoming.” As the Buddha said, all our desires for becoming lead to suffering, but he also uses becoming on the path. This is very typical of his strategies. There are many things that you use as you’re on your path that you then discard when you reach the goal. It’s like making a chair or a set … 
  10. The Body Doesn’t Care
     … The duty for the second noble truth, the cause of suffering, is to abandon it because it’s when you abandon the cause that you can solve the problem of suffering. Look at the third noble truth: That actually is the abandoning, where you successfully abandon the craving. But there’s an extra duty there on top of that, which is to be very … 
  11. Shame & Compunction
     … So it’s a combination of right view and right resolve—right view in the principle of kamma, and leading to the deeper right view of realizing what causes suffering in the mind comes from our own actions. But the way to the end of suffering also comes from our own actions. Then you have the right resolve of goodwill. Given that you have … 
  12. Top Priorities
     … The quality of your work suffers. The amount of help you can give them suffers as well. So this is one of those rare areas where looking after your own well-being is also, at the same time, looking at the well-being of other people. The more energy you develop inside, the more solid your mind, then the more you have to offer … 
  13. The Breath Soufflé
     … As the Buddha said, the path to the end of suffering is something you put together. The word he used, *sankhara, *can also mean fabrication, construction. You put these things together. The putting together requires effort. It requires all the factors of the path. So in the third step, you tell yourself, “I’ll breathe in aware of the whole body.” That talking to … 
  14. Dreams & Voices
     … But then there are the standards of the four noble truths, and one of those is the third noble truth, that the cessation of suffering is possible. And it’s not just a blank or boring lack of suffering. Think about when the Buddha came to teach the five brethren: Before he taught them the four noble truths, he said, “Look, I’m going … 
  15. Strategic Friends
     … You come to see more and more clearly that when the Buddha was talking about suffering and stress, it wasn’t because he was pessimistic. It was because he had a way out. He found that the ways you used to make yourself suffer can fall by the wayside. You look at them clearly, and you really don’t want to go there anymore … 
  16. Discernment Performs
     … If you don’t keep this up as a regular practice, you find that your health suffers. You don’t have the strength to keep up the meditation. Your concentration suffers. But once you’ve done the work with the breath, then you let things get as still as possible and allow that sense of the observer to separate out. And then learn how … 
  17. Borrowed Wealth
     … So the goodness that comes from meditation comes from getting the mind to settle down, and you can use that settled-down mind to understand why you’re suffering and how you can stop. That way, the mind gets lighter and lighter as you begin to peel away all of its attachments. You’ve got a genuine profit there: something, as they say in … 
  18. Barriers in the Heart
    A lot of our suffering and stress come from the limitations we feel in our lives. We’ve got this body that needs constant care, and even though we care for it, what does it do? It starts getting old, it gets ill, it finally dies, no matter how well we care for it. And it doesn’t ask permission before it does any … 
  19. How to Listen to the Dhamma
     … Appropriate attention basically asks two kinds of questions with regard to your behavior in general: “What’s skillful and should be developed, and what’s unskillful that should be abandoned?” Then, as you get into the mind: “Where is the suffering right now? What am I clinging to, how am I clinging to it, and where is the cause? What’s the craving that … 
  20. Right Mindfulness
     … You can keep in mind the fact that you want to put an end to suffering, or you can keep in mind a decision to rob a bank. In either case, it’s mindfulness. Mindfulness becomes right depending on the task to which you put it, it becomes wrong depending on the task to which you put it. There is such a thing as … 
  21. The Buddha’s Protection
     … In fact, the choices you make right now will make the difference between whether you suffer in the present moment or not. It’s a question of learning how to be skillful. This is the most basic of the Buddha’s teachings: the distinction between skillful and unskillful actions. One of his students was accused one time by people who said, “This teacher of … 
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