Search results for: "Suffering"
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- On Deserving to Be Happy… Remember the Buddha never asked people if they deserved to suffer before he taught them. He said, “This is how you can stop suffering,” regardless of what they’d done in the past. After all, the mind can change direction. As I said, what you are comes from what you do, so you might as well do good things. Look at them and do …
- Wind, Fire, Water, Earth, Space… And we’d be depriving ourselves of a lot of the tools that are really, really useful for understanding how we create suffering and understanding how to bring that suffering to an end.
- Willing to Question Yourself… Without those things, we would die or we’d really suffer quite a lot. The body has a lot of needs. But then you look at the body in and of itself, and it’s not anything that’s all that valuable. I was reading one of Ajaan Funn’s Dhamma talks recently, and he was talking about all these things in the body …
- Right Resolve in Real Life… The discernment begins with the realization that, as the four noble truths say, if the mind is suffering, it’s because of something in the mind. An abbot of a monastery in England was talking one time about a number of members of his community who were complaining all the time about the conditions in the monastery: This wasn’t right; that wasn’t …
- Awe… To think in these ways really helps us to let go of the attachments that are causing us suffering, that weigh the mind down. So here we are in the midst of a storm. But there’s something deep inside that doesn’t have to suffer from the storm, doesn’t have to be threatened by the storm. Even though we may reflect on …
- A Noble Path… We understand things for the purpose of putting an end to suffering, for the purpose of walking the path. He doesn’t talk about the real nature of things in and of themselves, whether they have a real nature or don’t have a real nature. But, he said, if you learn to look at things in this way and act on it, this …
- Endurance & Restraint… After all, the selves we’ve been for such a long time have been creating suffering. We want to learn new skills and, as we develop the new skills, we become new people: Harmless to those around us. Steadfast in the face of difficulties. Not weighing ourselves down unnecessarily. Here again, think about the principle of endurance: How you talk to yourself makes a …
- Surveying the World… one, so that you won’t have to suffer as the world suffers—you’ll have your own independent source of well-being; that’s for your own good, and for the good of others—and, two, so that you’ll be in a better position to figure out what you can do that would actually be helpful to the world. After all, think …
- Deep Time… There’s more a sense of a lot of the suffering accomplishing nothing. So the proper response is not a tragic view of the world. It’s more samvega, followed by dispassion: in other words, realizing that you simply don’t want to keep on continuing with all these cycles. They go nowhere. They go up and come down, up and down, around and …
- The Path to Stream Entry… Seeing the deathless, you realize that what the Buddha said was true; it really does put an end to suffering. You’ve had a glimpse: As the Canon says in several places, you’ve actually had a direct experience, a direct knowledge of nibbāna. That’s what guarantees your conviction in the Buddha. Think of the sutta of the elephant’s footprint: The image …
- Meditation as a Skill… The big problem, as the Buddha said, is that we want happiness and yet we cause ourselves suffering. There’s a blank space there in the mind someplace. We don’t see the connection between what we’re doing and the stress and suffering we’re causing through what we do. If you can solve that problem, you’ve solved everything that really needs …
- Talking to Yourself… At the moment, other people’s suffering is not your issue. Other people’s happiness, other people’s abilities or lack of abilities: These are not the issues right now. The issues are your own ability or lack of ability, the way you place suffering and stress on your own mind, and your ability to relieve some of that even if it’s just …
- Decisions… The Buddha talks about the duty with regard to the second noble truth, which is the cause of suffering. He says you let it go. And what is the cessation of suffering? It’s precisely that: the letting-go of the cause of suffering, the letting-go of craving. But that truth also has a duty, which is that you want to verify it …
- Virtue, Concentration, Discernment… You see how the mind creates unnecessary suffering for itself—sometimes in the concentration, sometimes as you’re leaving concentration, sometimes as you’re going through the day—and you learn to drop that. Whatever is causing it, you drop the cause. So it’s all one process, simply that it differs in levels of subtlety. What you find that as you make it …
- Committed to the Breath… You’re committing yourself to the energy that’s keeping the body and the mind together—the question being: “What am I already doing with the energy, and what better things can be done with this energy?” As we all know from the Buddha’s analysis of how we all cause suffering, there’s a lot of activity that goes on even before we …
- At the End of the Day… That’s the suffering in the four noble truths. The physical pain itself is not the suffering in the four noble truths. The suffering in the four noble truths is the clinging. And how do we cling? We cling through perceptions. Work on your perceptions around the pain. Be curious about the pain. Then you can transfer the same set of questions into events …
- Escape from Inter-eating… There’s a lot of suffering that goes into that. So he taught us to be heedful of both dangers. This is where his teachings on heedfulness go beyond the ordinary. Ordinary teachings on heedfulness say that if you’re going out into the wilderness, you learn how not to be prey of whatever big animals are out there, prey to whatever diseases are …
- Four Determinations… We’re determined, of course, on the end of suffering, which Ven. Sariputta, one of the Buddha’s main disciples, equated with the subduing of desire and passion. We’re determining on total freedom, determining on unbinding, which, the Buddha taught, completes four determinations. The first is the determination for discernment, because the discernment that frees us from our defilements is the highest noble …
- Centered on Concentration… Training requires discipline, with the realization that our untrained minds cause a lot of suffering. The Buddha once said that the mark of a wise person is realizing that the mind needs training. If you want to be truly happy, you’ve got to train the mind, because the biggest source of trouble in the world is this untrained mind. Greed, anger, and delusion …
- Noble Wealth… Because as the Buddha discovered, there is a big problem if you want to put an end to suffering. The cause of suffering is the kind of craving that leads to becoming: taking on an identity in a world of experience. But the problem is that not only does craving for becoming cause becoming, but craving for non-becoming—i.e., destroying the becomings …
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