Search results for: "Attachment"

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  2. The Role of Attachment
    We’re often told that non-attachment plays an important role in the practice. What we rarely hear is how important the role of attachment is, but it has its role as well. There’s a discourse where the Buddha talks about the traditions of the noble ones. There are four altogether. The first three are: contentment with the food you get, the clothing … 
  3. Pleasure Has a Price
     … Sometimes you hear warnings about the dangers of getting attached to the pleasure of jhana, the pleasure of concentration, but those are nothing compared to the dangers of being attached to sensuality. People can kill over sensuality. They lie, they steal, and they cheat. I don’t know anybody who’s done that over jhana. This is a totally harmless form of pleasure we … 
  4. Unburdensome, Part 2
     … The suffering is in your attachments. And those are areas where we tend to be very insensitive to where we’re being burdensome, and insensitive to where our attachments are inappropriate. So open your mind to this possibility, that where you’re most dearly attached and you have the strongest feelings about how right it is to be attached there, that’s precisely where … 
  5. An Auspicious Birth
     … But it’s really made auspicious by this other kind of birth, the momentary attachment, because not all attachment is bad. There are good attachments to the aggregates, as when you latch on to the path. After all, that’s what we’re concerned with as we practice. Sometimes we commemorate the first kind of birthday hoping that it’s going to be an … 
  6. Focus on Your Intention
     … peeling away your attachments to distractions. The Buddha wants to get you attached here at the concentration, so that when you finally do turn your attention on the fabricated nature of the concentration and start trying to develop dispassion for it and use the perceptions that would lead to dispassion, this will be your last attachment. You’ll clearly see it as being inconstant … 
  7. All for the Sake of Freedom
     … But to get there, you’ve got to train it, because no matter how much you might explain things to yourself about how this attachment is bad or that attachment is stupid, if you don’t give the mind something good to hold onto in the meantime, it’s going to go back to its old attachments. It’s going to say, “Well, it … 
  8. Right Fear
     … If you find yourself unwilling to take those risks, you have to ask yourself, “Where’s the attachment?” In this way, you get a really good take on where your defilements lie, where your attachments lie—issues you might not have noticed before. People might ask you in the abstract, “Are you attached to this?” “Well, no, not really.” But when push comes to … 
  9. More than Ordinary Heedfulness
     … Take, for instance, our attachment to the body. It’s a normal thing. As long as we have a body, we have to take care of it, and it seems natural to be attached to it. What happens, of course, is that your attachment to the body gives you a reason to be afraid of death. Simply the fact that you have a body … 
  10. Parsing Out Suffering
     … That was what he was attached to, not so much the bodies out there, but his perceptions about them. You could say the same thing about your thought fabrications around fantasizing about your pleasures. Sometimes—often—the pleasures are not nearly as nice as your fantasies. You’re actually attached to the fantasies more than you are to the pleasures. There are people attached … 
  11. A Mind Without Inertia
     … When the Buddha says that we’re attached to sensuality, it’s not so much sensual things that we’re attached to. We’re attached to passion for sensual thoughts, our obsession with sensual thoughts. We love to think about sensual pleasures. If we can’t get one sensual pleasure, well, we’re happy to think about another one. But we’re really attached … 
  12. Attachment to Views
     … This is where the issue of non-attachment to views actually becomes total non-attachment. But even then, as we see in the case of the Buddha, he would teach other people how to use the raft, what worked and what didn’t, and how to make a raft for themselves. That’s not called attachment to views, that’s called skillful use of … 
  13. Unattractiveness
     … But there’s an attachment that’s not lust. There’s just a sense of possessiveness, a sense of specifically who you are. There are a lot of unskillful things you will do to protect this body. And the contemplation of the unattractiveness of the body is also meant to cut that kind of attachment. People who would come to meditate with Ajaan Fuang … 
  14. Mindfulness Aims at Concentration
     … You can think about the world outside and how it’s inconstant, and those thoughts don’t have much impact if you’re not attached to things outside. If you have lots of different potentials where you could go, then when you lose your attachment to one thing, there are other things that you could get attached to. But when you focus all your … 
  15. Antidotes for Clinging
     … When you see that views really can’t express the truth about things, and that holding onto them is going to cause you to suffer, you can cut through your attachment to them. As for habits and practices, he first has you look at the actual habits or precepts and practices you’re attached to. The attachment here is to the idea that if … 
  16. Don’t Hang Around Your Corpse
     … Just realize, okay, this is all there is to a body—just these things and we’re so attached to it, so attached to its needs. People will do all kinds of things to protect their bodies, protect their survival of the body, but what is it made of? And then it’s going to die on them anyhow at some point, and if … 
  17. Fear of Death
     … So learn how not to hang around it now, not to be attached to it now. Use it, especially focusing on the breath, as a means for getting past your attachment to sensuality, but then also learn to get beyond being attached to the body. You can develop a sense of space around the body, through the body, and that helps you with the … 
  18. A Connoisseur of Happiness
     … In any event, I don’t know anyone who’s killed anyone, stolen anything, or broken any of the other precepts through attachment to jhana. But you look at the way people are attached to sensual pleasures: It’s the source for a lot of the cruelty, heartlessness, and thoughtlessness in the world, all the harm that people cause one another. If you’re … 
  19. A Greater Happiness
     … One is attachment to sensual pleasures, thinking that they’re our only real source of happiness in life, so we’ve got to hold on to them as much as we can. The second one is attachment to your body, thinking that if the body goes, that’s the end. Third is knowledge that you’ve done something cruel and there’s the possibility … 
  20. Evaluation
     … It’s the kind of discernment that ultimately can get you away from your attachment to the concentration altogether, but first you use your discernment to get yourself attached, because this is a good attachment. When you’re well attached to the breath, well attached to the sense of well-being in the body, it makes it a lot easier to step back from … 
  21. Bad Friends Inside
     … They’re not attached to us. We’re the ones attached to them. And because we’re attached, we’re the ones who are imprisoned. We’re the ones who are limited by our attachment. It’s when you let go that you’re freed, free from any kind of limitation. This is one of the reasons why there’s so much emphasis in … 
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