Search results for: "Attachment"

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  2. The Five Faculties Confirmed
     … Now, that fivefold analysis is something the Buddha usually reserves for dealing with unskillful things, or objects of attachment, objects of clinging, but here he’s applying it to the path. It’s interesting that the Commentary, which likes to explain everything down to the last little word in the suttas, doesn’t explain anything in that particular sutta at all. What the sutta … 
  3. Intoxication
     … Do you want to get attached to that person? Because that’s where it’s all going to go. When you look at material things, they go to aging, illness, and death as well. Think of all the unskillful things that people do just for material things—killing, stealing, cheating—and what do they get? They end up with just the dregs of the … 
  4. Skillful Fear
     … The only drawback you might have was that you might get attached to it, not wanting to go on to the higher levels of discernment and insight. But compared with sensuality, it’s much less damaging. Nobody kills, steals, cheats over jhana. And even though they have jhana wars, they’re just wars where ink is spilled. No blood is spilled. So nurture that … 
  5. Perception
     … We use the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, not-self, of seeing what is ugly in what we tend to view as beautiful, i.e., the human body, so that we can loosen up our attachments to a lot of our old unskillful perceptions. Then we let those more skillful perceptions fall away as well. But don’t drop them until they’ve done their … 
  6. Balance & Release
     … That’s when it’s a lot easier to release it from its attachments. Otherwise, the release is just aversion, dislike. You’re trying to run away from something. You don’t like this; you don’t like that. You push yourself away. But the pushing becomes another type of becoming. As the Buddha said, craving for non-becoming leads to more becoming. The … 
  7. Mountains Moving In
     … So he tried to eradicate all attachment to pleasure in his mind by tormenting himself, but that didn’t work. Then he had the great insight that it wasn’t so much the search for pleasure that was wrong, it was simply that he was looking in the wrong places for happiness. He was looking in the wrong way, in a very shortsighted way … 
  8. Mange in the Mind
     … Then the question is, what are you going to do with this functioning body? You could get attached to it, but that creates suffering. This is why we have the chant on the 32 parts, to remind ourselves not to get too obsessed with the body, not to think that the body in and of itself is going to provide you with true happiness … 
  9. A Master of Your Thoughts
     … We’re attached to our thoughts because they have meaning. It has its uses, the act of giving meaning to these little impulses that go to the brain. That’s an important part of functioning in the world. But we have to see how that functioning is not always good, not always skillful, not always necessary. There are times we’re better off when … 
  10. Friendship Leading to Seclusion
     … bodily seclusion, mental seclusion, and then seclusion from your attachments. Bodily seclusion is when you’re away from other people, as when you go off and sit in your hut, sit in your tent, sit under the trees, and there’s nobody around except for you and the animals. But you can be secluded in that way and still have lots and lots of … 
  11. A Sense of Adventure
     … So how are you going to know the signposts for one, two, and three? Well, you guess for the time being and you attach a few notes here, a few notes there. And have the confidence that when you find something more certain, you’re going to be in a position to rearrange the notes if need be. The sense of adventure also means … 
  12. True Values
     … The more you can let go of your attachments, the more you can let go of your cravings and clingings, then the higher the level of your mind. The more you can bring the mind to concentration, the higher its level will be. Even more so, when you can reach the levels of the noble attainments. That kind of status is genuine, and again … 
  13. The Problem Is Birth
     … Notice that when he was asked, “What happens when a being goes from one body to another?” he didn’t say, “There’s no such thing as a being.” He said that wherever there’s attachment to the aggregates—form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness—there is a being. It’s in taking on that identity as a being: That’s why we keep on … 
  14. Mindful to Be Skillful
     … It very easily turns into attachment to habits and practices, thinking, “As long as I follow the rules, I’m okay. That’s all I need to do.” But that’s not what the Buddha wants to encourage. It’s a fetter. He wants you to practice the precepts, work on concentration, work on discernment specifically for the sake of discernment, the kind of … 
  15. Clinging
     … So you’re putting yourself together out of verbs, and you want to see that, because that gives you a way of loosening up your attachments to unskillful parts of yourself, the ones that say, “Well, I’ve been this way since who knows when. You’re not going to teach old dogs new tricks.” But you look at your aggregates. They’re not … 
  16. Measuring Progress
     … But the possibility of its really developing and also being an influence on the rest of your life depends on your alertness right now, your sensitivity right now, your ability to catch little things going on that might pull you away, and your ability to cut through any ties or any attachments that may develop. That’s what makes the meditation progress. And you … 
  17. Positive Capability
     … And he gives us the tools for examining where our attachments are—the things that keep us imprisoned. That’s the big irony. This is one of the reasons why early Buddhists used fire as an image many times. They believed that fire was an element that existed in all things. When you provoked it, it would latch on to fuel and start burning … 
  18. Solidly Established
     … You keep on adjusting the rate of breathing, even if there’s just a little bit of discomfort attached to the breath, whether you’re tensing up as you breathe in or holding on to tension as you breathe out. Try to be sensitive to that and then let the tension go. Those are the three qualities we’re trying to develop: mindfulness, alertness … 
  19. Space for Sustained Contemplation
     … Whatever the attachment is, whatever the craving is, you realize it has to be made out of these things. That’s what you want to look for. This is work that requires a lot of sustained attention and sustained focus, which is why, as we’re living together, we want to give one another space to do that kind of sustained work. We don … 
  20. Awaken to Your Potentials
     … He said that if they didn’t have their pleasures, we wouldn’t be attached to them. But the pleasures can go only so far. Most people will say, “Well, that’s the best we can find in the world, that’s as far as it goes, so we might as well content ourselves with them as they are.” But the Buddha found that … 
  21. Consciousness, Name, & Form
     … When there’s that sense of well-being, then the mind can look at its old attachments, its old ways of handling its thoughts, and realize, “Okay, that way of dealing with things actually causes stress and I don’t have to do it.” When you realize that it’s stressful, and that it’s unnecessary, why would you hold on? You don’t … 
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