Your happiness is directly related to the happiness of other people. You can practice compassion in many ways: [21] X Research source Turn off your cell phone when you are spending time with friends and family. Make eye contact when someone is talking to you and listen without interrupting. Volunteer in your community. Open doors for other people. Be empathetic towards people. For example, if someone is upset, acknowledge and try to understand why they are upset.
Ask them what you can do to help. Listen and show concern for their feelings. Be mindful. When you practice mindfulness, you pay attention to how you think and feel in the present moment. Mindfulness is not only for meditation but for your every day life as well. For example, you can be mindful as you eat, shower, or get dressed in the morning. Go to source Start by choosing one activity and then focus on the sensations in your body and your breathing as you do it. As you wash the dishes, pay attention to the temperature of the water, how your hands feel as you clean the dishes, and how the water feels as you rinse the dishes.
Instead of listening to the music or the television as you get dressed in the morning, get ready in silence. Notice how you feel. Were you tired or well rested when you woke up? How does your body feel as you put on clothes or shower? Part 3. Identify suffering.
Buddha describes suffering differently than you may usually think of it. Suffering is inevitable and is a part of life. Dukkha is the truth that all is suffering. Yet, Buddha considers desires i. These two things are considered the roots of suffering because humans are rarely ever satisfied or content.
Once one desire is met, another desire is created. This is a vicious cycle. Dukkha means "that which is difficult to bear. Determine the cause of suffering. Desire and ignorance are the root of suffering. For example, if you are sick, you are suffering. While you are sick, you desire to be well. Your unmet desire to be well is a greater form of suffering than just being sick.
Any time you desire a thing, opportunity, person, or achievement that you cannot have, you are suffering. The only guarantees in life aging, sickness, and death. Once you achieve or get something that you want, you will begin to desire something else. Your constant cravings keep you from achieving true happiness. End suffering in your life. Each of the four truths is a stepping stone. If all is suffering and suffering comes from your desires, then the only way to end suffering is by no longer having desires.
To end the suffering in your life, you must change your perception and learn to control your desires. Controlling your desires and cravings will allow you to live with freedom and contentment. Attain the end of suffering in your life. The end of suffering can be attained by traveling the Noble Eightfold Path. First, you have to to have the right intentions and mindset.
Secondly, you have to live out your right intentions in your everyday life. Lastly, you have to understand true reality and have the correct beliefs about all things. The eightfold path can be divided into three categories: wisdom right view, right intention , ethical conduct right speech, right action, right livelihood , and mental cultivation right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
If desire is the causation of suffering, isn't all of life desire? When we are hungry we desire food. When tired we desire sleep. How do we banish these desires without dying or losing our minds? Yes, you are right, all of that is driven by desire. There are three bases of desire: lobha greed , dosa aversion , and moha delusion.
Desire within these three bases is acknowledged as the causation of suffering. When you are hungry, it is okay to eat in the motivation of fulfilling daily nutrition necessity for doing the right effort. Do not eat more than you need because it gains greed lobha.
It's okay for you to desire to be free from these three bases, it's called right effort. It is also okay to read some Dhammapada verse. Not Helpful 9 Helpful If all Buddhists ultimately desire to attain Nirvana, then isn't that a contradiction if they can't attain it as long as they have desire?
I am confused. Don't be confused by the word "desire" used to explain the causes of suffering with the "desire" used to describe one's wish or will. An example of the former is our greed, some examples of the latter are birthday wishes and our ambition. Obsession about satisfying desire ultimately leads to all kinds of suffering, while fulfilling a wish keeps one's mind focused and directional. Once we make a wish, we may not be as obsessive as satisfying our desire to fulfill the wish. The "desire" to attain Nirvana is an aspiration to all Buddhists who have to be mindful of all conditions that may obstruct them to attain it, including their own "obsessive desire" to attain it.
Not Helpful 4 Helpful One of the tips on this page says, "Find what you enjoy and do more of it," but isn't that just indulging one's desires and, therefore, increasing suffering? Finding what you enjoy more and doing more of it does not lead to nirvana. You need to free yourself from all defilements. The main cause for suffering is craving, which happens due to greed, ignorance and hatred.
The best way to attain nirvana is meditating. Not Helpful 14 Helpful Achieving Nirvana will probably not be easy. It may take a long time. Even if it feels impossible, keep trying. Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0. You can practice Buddhism on your own, but you may benefit from going to a temple and having a teacher. Don't rush to decide on a group or teacher. Always trust your own instinct with this and take your time.
There are great teachers out there and some very unpleasant ones. Do your homework. The eightfold path is not a linear path. It is a journey that you travel every day. Your path to enlightenment will be different from everyone else's, just as every snow flake takes a unique route through the sky. Try different methods of meditating, they're just tools and methods to use along the way. A varied set of tools is useful at different times.
Nirvana is attained when the misconception of the way the self and everything else exists ceases permanently. Before cif belief , I never dreamed I would synchronise my journalistic career and meditation practice, finding national newspaper space to write from a Buddhist perspective. Buddhism is reaching beyond academia, think tanks and the media. Most GPs are aware of mindfulness-based stress reduction MBSR and cognitive therapy MBCT , well-researched approaches to health problems which feature meditation as their core component.
As Mark Vernon says , "people right now are slowly eating raisins in a workshop somewhere near you. I'm glad they are, because if Buddhist practices are to work, they must be what they say on the tin — practices. Reading about them or studying them scientifically may be helpful as inspiration, but unless the disciplines are applied repeatedly , the effect will be minimal.
It's one thing to decide that compassion is a good thing, that mindfulness could make us healthier, or that there is no separate self, but quite another to develop compassion, mindfulness and selflessness. Our bodies and brains are products of millions of years of evolution that have programmed us to behave in certain ways, and as most of us discover painfully, it is not so easy to change habits we carry from the past.
That is why Buddhism offers a path — a route to clear seeing, well-being and skilful action that has been tried and tested by lineages of practitioners over thousands of years, and which recognises that contentment cannot usually be attained just by seeing what would bring it about. Without a lasting commitment to practice, we may get flashes of insight, and even be able to make some wise choices, but these are unlikely to be sustained, and we will mostly remain stuck in our old modes of operating.
Worse, we may become blindly convinced that our existing viewpoint is the most enlightened one available. I've just returned from three weeks at Dechen Choling , a French retreat centre where the manifestation of Buddhist principles is attempted in social microcosm. As well as many hours of formal practice and teaching each day, we ate together in silence, shared work chores, exercised, cared for one another, and celebrated as a community. Or, as it is put more formally in ancient texts that spell out the 12 causal links: through the condition of the sensory faculties, contact arises.
And here is the next link: through the condition of contact, feelings arise — which makes sense, because, in the Buddhist view and in the view of many modern psychologists , the things we perceive through our sense organs tend to come with feelings attached, however subtle the feelings.
Here is how Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American Buddhist monk who has translated reams of ancient Buddhist texts into English, put it in a series of lectures he recorded in This is where we start to segue from the exotic to the naturalistic. The liberation that Bhikkhu Bodhi is talking about is, in the first instance, a liberation from perpetual rebirth, a liberation that will fully kick in at the end of this life cycle.
But it is also liberation in the here and now, liberation from the suffering that tanha brings — liberation from the craving to capture pleasant feelings and to escape unpleasant feelings, liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.
These two senses of liberation — liberation from rebirth, and liberation from suffering — are reflected in the Buddhist idea that there are two kinds of nirvana. As soon as you are liberated in the here and now, you enter a nirvana you can enjoy for the rest of your life. If you observe your feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can escape the control.
Mindfulness involves, among other things, cultivating an awareness of your feelings that fundamentally changes your relationship to them. So, regardless of how exotic or how practical your aspirations — whether you believe in a cycle of rebirth and want to escape it, or just want to attain complete liberation in the here and now, or for that matter just hope to find partial liberation in the here and now — a key tool in the quest for liberation, mindfulness, remains the same.
And, accordingly, some of the basic terminology remains the same. The things in your environment — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people, the news, the videos — are pushing your buttons, activating feelings that, however subtly, set in motion trains of thought and reaction that govern your behaviour, sometimes in ways that are unfortunate. All of this points to the sense in which the ancient Buddhist appraisal of the human condition is very modern in spirit.
The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control are the feelings that arise in response to the input.
A donut smells good, so we approach it; a restless hunger feels bad so we try to escape it — by, say, eating a donut; social status feels good and ridicule feels bad, so we pursue and avoid, respectively. If you interact with such feelings via tanha — via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings — you will continue to be controlled by the world around you.
But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behaviour can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.
T here are debates within Buddhism about how dramatically to conceive of nirvana and the unconditioned. Or is it a bit more mundane, just freedom from the mindless reactivity to causes, to conditions, that would otherwise control you?
Thinking of complete liberation in the here and now as a kind of zone — a metaphorical if not a metaphysical zone — might be useful. And it might be useful regardless of whether you think the zone is realistically reachable or just something you can get closer and closer to. When I phoned my wife after my first weeklong silent meditation retreat, she said I sounded like a completely different person — before I had even said anything about the retreat, or said anything of substance at all.
The very tenor of my voice sounded different, she said. And she liked the new tenor a lot. Now, I grant you that this might have been more of a comment on the old tenor than on the new one.
Anyway, the point is that there had been a real change of tenor. Certainly, the world as I saw it had a new tenor. I had shed so much of my usual self-absorption that I could take a new kind of delight in the people and things around me.
I was more open, suddenly inclined to strike up conversations with strangers. The world seemed newly vibrant and resonant. It is the fate of all conditioned things to change when conditions change. And conditions change all the time. And you would think that a meditative discipline devoted, in some sense, to tamping down the influence of feelings on perception, to fostering a view of sober clarity, would only abet that tendency.
After that first retreat, I felt like I was living in a zone of enchantment, a place of wonder and preternatural beauty.
0コメント