Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Commit, Reflect, Discern
     … As he said, this is the factor that can turn anything in the mind into a source of suffering. The word avijjā doesn’t mean just not knowing about things. It also means a lack of skill. You’re not skilled in the duties of the four noble truths: You don’t know how to comprehend suffering well, you don’t know how to … 
  3. Trustworthy Judgment
     … Several years back when I had my last visit with Ajaan Suwat, he had been in a car accident and suffered some brain damage, but his training in meditation hadn’t abandoned him. He was able to tell when the mind was sending him weird perceptions, skewed perceptions. As he said, that thing he got from his meditation, that didn’t change; but he … 
  4. Joyous Endurance
     … As he said, if you look for your happiness there, if you make that your direction, you’re just going to keep on suffering. But if you can learn how to use causes and conditions to aim at something that doesn’t change, then you’re rightly directed. So right now we’re trying to create a state of concentration in the mind. Direct … 
  5. The Primacy of the Mind (1)
     … This is how you organize your response to the facts of aging, illness, and death—how you organize your response to the realization that you are responsible for the suffering that weighs down the mind, which means that you can make a difference. You can choose to stop causing that suffering. So instead of going with the flow, you go against the flow. You … 
  6. No One in Charge
     … If you act on motivations based on greed, aversion, or delusion, there’s going to be suffering. If you act on motivations based on renunciation, non-ill will, or harmlessness, it pulls you out of suffering. So it’s not the case that, because there’s no purpose to things, there’s no pattern at all. You’re not totally free to shape things … 
  7. A Pervasive Well-being
     … Once the mind is in this state of awareness and supported by all the other elements in the path—right view, right resolve, right action, right speech, right effort, right mindfulness—it can do amazing things to your understanding of yourself, your understanding of the way the mind acts, the way it creates suffering for itself, the way it doesn’t have to create … 
  8. Discerning the Middle Way
     … As the Buddha said, with some causes of suffering all you have to do is look at them and they go away. Those are the kinds that survive in the mind simply because you’re not looking, not paying much attention to them. But as you notice them and watch them, you realize, “This is ridiculous,” and you can drop them. But there are … 
  9. In Gratitude- Ajaan Suwat
     … You’re not self-centered in being selfish, but you are self-centered in realizing that the big problem in life is the problem of the suffering that you’re causing yourself.” So you’ve got to focus there, inside yourself. Straighten out things inside yourself. Make that your center. Once the center inside is straightened out, then you have time for others. Of … 
  10. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … We’re looking for the cause of suffering. We want to see what arises together with the suffering, what passes away together with the suffering, so that we can know where it comes from. And this focused analysis is also a burning away of the defilement. As soon as you see the defilement for what it is, and how stupid it is, and how … 
  11. Uncertainty
     … So look around and try to ferret out the voices that are encouraging, that say, “There is a way to put an end to suffering. There is a way to find happiness. It is possible to breathe comfortably in the present moment.” Those are the voices that are on your side. Remember Ajaan Lee’s analogy that there may be lots of different consciousnesses … 
  12. Two Kinds of Defilements
    As the Buddha said, there are two kinds of causes of suffering. There are the ones that go away if you simply look at them with equanimity. And there are others that won’t go away unless you, as he says, exert a fabrication against them. In other words, you have to put in effort to figure them out and really actively uproot them … 
  13. Meditating When You’re Sick
     … There’s a story in the Canon about the Buddha suffering from an injury to his foot. Mara came up and taunted him as he was lying there and said, “Are you moping? Are you sad?” And the Buddha said, “No. I’m developing goodwill for all beings.” That’s a good exercise, so that you’re not concentrating on your own pain or … 
  14. The Skills of a Hunter
     … One of the kids, after twenty minutes of meditating, came out and said he was suffering from sensory deprivation. And that was just twenty minutes. We’re so used to stimuli all the time. That’s our food. Without it, we feel starved. So you have to learn how to feed off of the activity of staying centered but with an all-around awareness … 
  15. The Psychology of Virtue
     … If you see the processes that give rise to becoming are causing you suffering, you can say, “I don’t have to engage in them. I don’t have to create a world around them.” Because that’s what we do—we create worlds. We focus on something we really want, and then we take on an identity as the person who might be … 
  16. True, Beneficial, Timely
     … What the Buddha’s teaching us is that we can master these habits as skills, so that instead of creating suffering for ourselves, we can use them to put an end to suffering. And then we can let them go—not out of hatred, not out of neurotic fear, but simply because they’ve taken us as far as we can go with them … 
  17. Determination
     … What are you doing that’s causing suffering? What can you do to stop that?—That’s when you develop your good eye. One of the other attributes is that you’re astute. For the shopkeeper, this means that you know how to go about buying something cheap and how to get other people to buy what you’re trying to sell. The astute … 
  18. Skillful Thinking
     … The first noble truth, the truth of suffering and stress, is an unskillful result. The unskillful cause is craving and ignorance. On the other side you’ve got the path of practice: that’s a skillful cause with the cessation of suffering as its result. So when situations present themselves to you, just ask yourself, “What’s the most skillful thing to do right … 
  19. The Gatekeeper Doesn’t Just Note
     … And only when it works together with its teams can it really do the job that needs to be done, which is to figure out why it is that the mind creates suffering for itself even though it doesn’t want to suffer, and how it can learn to stop. When you understand the function of mindfulness, it’s a lot easier to get … 
  20. Fear of Death
     … You don’t have to like all beings; you simply decide that you don’t want to cause them suffering. You don’t want to take pleasure in their suffering. As you think about it, what good do you get out of other people’s suffering? You don’t gain anything at all. There may be a sense of schadenfreude, but that’s pretty … 
  21. Riding an Elephant to Catch Grasshoppers
     … What views was it using? What intentions was it acting on? What intentions could be used to put an end to suffering? In this mode, there are no stories, there’s no worldview, there are simply actions and results. And it was getting down to this mode that the Buddha was able to solve his problems. Now, with the other two modes, the way … 
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