Search results for: "Suffering"

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  2. Discernment Through Ardency & Evaluation
     … This fits in with that question the Buddha said lies at the basis of discernment: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term suffering? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and benefit?” Discernment lies in the knowledge that what you do is having an impact on your experience and how you can change it to … 
  3. Glad to Be Here
     … People claim to be looking for happiness, and yet they do the things that are going to lead to suffering. You have to have compassion for them, but you also have to see the irony—so that you don’t get sucked into their narratives. It’s the same with your own mind. Your mind has some very unhealthy narratives that you have to … 
  4. How to Be Happy
     … Those make the difference between whether you’re going to suffer or not suffer at any given moment. So keep careful watch over what you’re doing right now, because that’s the source of true happiness if you do it with skill. And the skill is something you can learn. That’s the good news of the Buddha’s teachings. Your happiness doesn … 
  5. The Truth of Desires
     … truths about things that are very close to your mind, truths about suffering, what the cause is, and what’s the desire behind this suffering. The Buddha lists the possible desires. What are the desires that get you out? There are lists of skillful desires as well: the desire to get rid of unskillful qualities that are there, and not to let them arise … 
  6. The Missing Fabrication
     … After all, if it’s in ignorance, it’s going to cause suffering, so we want to bring knowledge to these processes, and we do it by working with the breath in the way the Buddha recommended. Now, if you look at the instructions from another angle, though, you notice that something is missing. When the Buddha talks about fabrications in dependent co-arising … 
  7. Ven. Ananda’s Awakening
     … You do want to put an end to suffering. You do want to make that change in your heart. It’s simply a matter of learning how to use that desire and use that effort so that the desire and the effort don’t get in the way. In other words, you focus your desires on the causes—what will take you there. So … 
  8. Goodwill Is Respect
     … The Buddha lists one of the forms of suffering as not getting what you want. He goes down the list of things that people want: They’re subject to aging and they’d rather be free from aging. They’re subject to illness and death and they’d rather be free from illness and death. They’re subject to sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and … 
  9. Training for Dispassion
     … Sariputta went on to say that if by abandoning unskillful qualities you met with pain and suffering, either short-term or long-term, then the Buddha wouldn’t have taught to abandon unskillful qualities. If, by developing skillful qualities, you wouldn’t experience ease in the present and long-term happiness, then the Buddha wouldn’t have taught that, either. This tells you something … 
  10. Forging a Path
     … that bigger dimension inside; that dimension where there’s no death, no illness, no suffering. And instead of allowing your map of your life to just be squiggly lines wandering and bouncing around, try to make it into a path—a path that goes someplace. So as you’re sitting here and different intentions come up, learn how to resist them. Don’t let … 
  11. Food for Endurance
     … Ask yourself, “How does this teaching apply to the suffering I’m undergoing right now? How does it teach me to comprehend that suffering? How does it teach me to let go of the cause? And to let go of the cause, what’s the path of practice I should develop?” Ask those questions, and that’s when you’re listening to the Dhamma … 
  12. Older than the Cosmos
     … He said that when each life ended, one thing kept coming to his mind: “all that suffering, all that suffering.” And yet we keep going for it. Think about King Koravya. Here he is, 80 years old. He means to put his foot in one place and it goes someplace else. He’s got a recurrent illness. He’s stashed away all kinds of … 
  13. Body Contemplation
     … Look into that desire, right there, because that’s the key to why we keep on suffering. We cling to the things that make us suffer, and this is why we like to lie to ourselves: so that we can keep on clinging, thinking that’s the only way to find happiness. So look at that, try to figure that one out, and you … 
  14. Dharma Warriors
    Dharma warriors going into battle with ignorance, craving, defilement, clinging, suffering: It’s an old image, an old analogy. It goes way back to the early texts. But before we take it on, it’s good to think about how genuine warriors fight, especially noble warriors, because those were the warriors in the time of the Buddha. To begin with, they put a lot … 
  15. Ups & Downs
     … This is why the Buddha said that our first reaction to pain and suffering is bewilderment: How did this happen? What’s going on? That inspires us to search to find a way out, to try to understand what’s going on. It’s good to keep that point in mind, that your mind is very complex; causality is very complex. What you’re … 
  16. Cleaning Out the Stables
     … But as the Buddha said, all of these states of becoming involve suffering. This is the process we have to overcome. And this is one of the reasons he taught the teaching on not-self: so that we could learn how to strip away, starting with the unskillful senses of self, all the unnecessary members of the stable and to develop a few necessary … 
  17. For Your Good the Good of Others
     … Otherwise, you suffer from what Kurt Vonnegut called samaratrophia. You try to help, help, help, and then you just run out of energy. You burn out. So for the good of the people around you, meditate. Try to get a sense of what it’s like to have the breath filling the body and a sense of well-being filling the body as well … 
  18. The Buddha’s Rules of Order
     … all this time to watch the mind, to train the mind, to get the various committee members working together on a project that’s really useful—developing the path, letting go of the cause of suffering so that you can realize what the cessation of suffering might be like.
  19. The Dhamma Eye
     … As the Buddha said, the cravings that lead to becoming are the source of suffering. So we have to know: What is this process that the Buddha’s talking about? Basically, you have a desire, then you see the world in which that desired object can be found, and then you take on a role in that world—you take on an identity. This … 
  20. Balancing the Bases for Concentration
     … So when you spread thoughts of goodwill all around, that includes inside, too, thoughts of goodwill to yourself, people you like, people don’t like, because you don’t gain anything from anyone’s unhappiness, from anyone’s suffering. No matter how much you might dislike somebody, that person’s suffering can actually come back and make you suffer as well. So wish happiness … 
  21. A Graduated Discourse
     … Sometimes he wouldn’t have to bother with hell, he’d just say, “Look at the common animals, see how they suffer.” Once you see that the drive to keep coming back to these levels is based on sensuality, he says that’s when you begin to see that renunciation is a place of safety—a state of mind that would pull you out … 
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