Search results for: "Suffering"
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- Questioning the Hindrances… What is the mind doing? What does it fabricate; what does it create? How are its fabrications skillful? How are they not? When you take that questioning attitude and combine it with the stillness, that’s when the mind really reaches breakthroughs in understanding, catches itself in action as it creates suffering. That’s one of the natures of the mind, that it creates …
- Freedom & Security… that have freedom of choice, that qualities in mind really matter, and that the suffering that weighs on you is not totally beyond your control, you have the choice to put an end to that kind of suffering because it comes from your own actions. This discernment grows out of some very simple principles, one of which being, as the Buddha said, knowing that …
- Lavish Goodwill… It points to a problem we all have, which is we’re creating suffering for ourselves. And it’s basically saying, “Look, this is how you can stop!” When you stop creating that suffering, you’re not left with just an empty, neutral state. You’re left with true happiness, which goes beyond abundant, beyond measureless. But to get there requires that you develop …
- Safe Haven… They have their sufferings, too. When you’re suffering, sometimes you say, “I don’t care about other people’s suffering.” But as you’re able to give rise to greater sense of well-being inside, it’s a lot easy to sympathize with other people. So it’s important to have that sense of safe haven, a place where you can get away …
- Gratitude, Goodwill & Generosity… thoughts of wishing for happiness for others, realizing you don’t really benefit from anybody’s suffering, so why wish suffering on other people? If you reflect on it for a minute, you realize that if everyone in the world could find true happiness within, we wouldn’t have all these problems. All the stupid things people do are because they don’t know …
- More than Ordinary Heedfulness… We can put an end to suffering. We don’t have to keep coming back to suffer again and again and again. It lies within our power to find an escape. So here, heedfulness is combined with confidence that there is a way out. But at the same time, this confidence makes heedfulness very demanding. There are a lot of dangers in life that …
- The Quality of Your Awareness… It’s same with the causes of suffering. They’re all happening. Just realize that’s what you’re looking for. You want to look in the movements of the mind that are impelled by craving of various kinds. Look in the areas where you find there’s a sense of being oppressed or burdened by something in the mind. How are you going …
- The Patience of a Hunter… You’re here to see how the mind is creating unnecessary suffering for itself, so you’re trying to learn how to look for the signs of how it does that. And one of the signs is, as you get the mind still: Where is there a disturbance? How do you know there’s a disturbance? When something goes up and down in the …
- Wisdom as a Tool… Is this going to help you understand suffering? Is it going to help you abandon craving? Will it help you develop the path? Those are the questions you want to ask. Ajaan Lee had a student, a woman who worked in the palace for many years. She had listened to many, many of the great sermon-givers in Bangkok in her time. When she …
- The Cost of Happiness… They get very insensitive to the costs of the way they’re looking for happiness, so they keep on creating more and more suffering instead of the happiness they want. They can’t seem to get out of that vicious cycle. From the Buddha’s point of view, this is a problem for all of us. He talked about how, after his awakening, he …
- Persuasion… Have a very live sense that, yes, it’s going to be you down the line who’s going to suffer from the unskillful things you do now. But there’s also you down the line who will benefit from the skillful things you do. Now, the problem is that your old powers of persuasion have been pretty good at poking holes in those …
- Reflections… Then you finally realize that this is why you’re suffering: You like doing them, but they cause what is actually suffering. So you’re going to have to change your attitude, change your allegiance inside. And that takes a lot of honesty to realize, “Okay, I’ve been wrong. This has been a mistake.” Not everyone can do that. But you’re not …
- Acceptance & Equanimity… You accept the fact that there are these things in the world, but then you have skills for dealing with them in such a way that you don’t have to suffer from them. The same principle applies to a quality that’s very close to acceptance, and that’s equanimity. Look at the various lists in which equanimity is mentioned. It’s always …
- Appreciation… They interpreted the first noble truth as “Life is suffering.” They interpreted nirvana as total annihilation: that somehow the only way out of suffering was to be wiped out. Yet here they saw Buddhists having a good time at Buddhist festivals. They thought, “These poor Buddhists, they don’t understand their own religion, they’ve distorted what the Buddha had to say”—that’s …
- Tranquility & Insight Together… And as the Buddha said, we do these things out of ignorance for the most part, and as a result, even though we’re looking for happiness or looking for pleasure, looking for well-being, we end up causing some stress and suffering—or actually quite a lot. If, however, you bring some knowledge to what you’re doing—understanding where there’s stress …
- Listening to the Practice… After all, if you’re not piling a lot of unnecessary suffering on top of yourself, you can be a lot more sensitive to the sufferings of other people. And you actually have more strength not only to be sensitive but also to do what you can to minimize any discomfort, any inconvenience that you may be causing them. So being kind to your …
- The Buddha’s Cost-Benefit Analysis… realizing that—given the four noble truths, particularly the truth of how suffering is originated—you want to avoid any thinking that would originate more suffering. So you learn how to step back from your thoughts, step back from your desires, and view them in this context of a cause-and-effect chain—where they come from, where they go—so that you can …
- Fabricated Path, Unfabricated Goal… In the beginning, you’ll be dealing with blatant examples of suffering, or blatant causes of suffering. So, for the time being, that amount of concentration is good enough for you. If you can see through a particular cause of suffering—if you realize that you’re losing your interest in it, you’re losing your desire to follow it—then that’s enough …
- A Refuge in Quiescence… what, when you do it, will lead to happiness; what, when you do it, will lead to suffering—not as a matter of conviction, but as a matter of knowledge. That’s when this home inside becomes really solid. The Buddha gives an analogy to building a house: You put up the rafters, especially the rafters for the roof, and then you place the …
- Renunciation… When you see that the causes of suffering are inside, and that the potential for putting an end to suffering is inside as well, you want to focus all your efforts here and not let them get scattered out. So as you’re working on right concentration, remember that this is how we fulfill the factors of right resolve. It’s the greater happiness …
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