Search results for: "Attachment"
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- You Can Do Better… He said that you have to be very careful because if it gets really strong, you’re going to get attached. He said the physical pleasure of concentration comes from tactile sensations, which means it’s a sensual pleasure. Wanting it is craving for sensuality. Well, the pleasure of concentration is not sensual, and it’s not a tactile sensation. It has to do …
- Being Your Own Teacher… If your calculation includes only this one lifetime, you’re really going to limit your sense of where the dangers are in the mind—what an act of desire or an act of attachment might do—which means that you end up with a lot of things in the mind that don’t get probed, don’t get investigated because they seem perfectly innocuous …
- The Door of the Cage (2)… This helps loosen up attachments to unskillful views about the world—that no matter how real they may seem, you do have the choice to look at other aspects of reality that give you more encouragement to practice, give you more reason to practice. And same with the various selves that you could be identifying with: Do you really want to identify with the …
- A Blameless Happiness… What is your intention right now? Is your intention to hold onto the body? Or are you willing to let go of some things that you thought you couldn’t do without, but you might actually be better off if you could let go of some of that attachment? What is your perception of the body? What is your perception of the pain? How …
- Comprehending Clinging… But to adopt these right forms of clinging—notice that views, habits and practices, and a sense of the self are there, but nothing about sensuality on the path—you also have to clear away your other forms of attachment. Sensuality, of course, is the big one. It’s going to pull you off if you’re not careful. This is why you have …
- The Reasonable Path… If our problem is attachment for pleasures, he had told himself, then let’s just totally avoid all kinds of pleasure, even to the extent of denying all the processes of the body. He suppressed his breathing. For a while he was even going to stop eating altogether, but the devas came and said, “If you stop eating, we’re going to pour divine …
- The Three Perceptions & Their Opposites… You can hold on to this insight into inconstancy, stress, and not-self and use it to pry away your attachments to lots of things. But you have to remember ultimately that these insights, too, are perceptions. Now, the Buddha never called the three characteristics three characteristics; they’re perceptions. And as he said, perceptions, no matter how perceptive they may be, are essentially …
- Use Your Imagination… When they talk about not being attached to outcome, it means that you’re willing to test things. If something doesn’t work out, you admit that it doesn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean you just leave it at that. You try to figure out what went wrong and then try to come up with a new solution. That story I …
- Strong Through Mindfulness… In this case, the point that Ajaan Lee is making has to do with attachment, clinging. So you want to keep these images in mind, you want to keep these words in mind, because they provide you with values—even when everything else gets stripped away in your life, as it will. As the Buddha said, we’re subject to aging, illness, and death …
- In Harmlessness Is Strength… It’s a good attachment. If you don’t have this form of pleasure, you’re going to go sneaking out and finding your pleasure in other places, not all of which may be skillful, and many of which are harmful both to yourself and to others. So learn to develop the strength of concentration, the strength that comes from having a sense of …
- Protective Meditations… So contemplate it in any way that can help you pry away your attachments to your body, until you can see it simply as a useful tool, one that gets worn down, worn down, and finally you’ll have to let go. Then, before you have to let it go, try to squeeze whatever goodness you can out of it. If the needs of …
- Safety All Around… And even though suffering in and of itself isn’t noble, craving isn’t noble, his truths about these things are noble, because they force you to question your attachments, question your thirst. You step back. That’s the beginning of dispassion. Dispassion comes from noticing that the things you’re doing are causing suffering. And you start to wonder: Are those things really …
- Not-self in Context… That’s interesting because usually he uses that five-fold analysis with things that are unskillful or attachments that are unskillful. Here he’s focusing it on parts of the path. But after all, the path is something originated. It is going to pass away some day. So before it passes away, you want to make use of it and then get beyond it …
- Antidotes to Craving… Craving for sensuality usually comes from our attachment to our sensual pleasures and our fascination with thinking about sensual pleasures. At the moment of death, of course, you’ll be pulled back to pleasures of the past. There can be a lot of nostalgia. You miss this, you miss that—this person, that situation. And it’s painful. As the Buddha said, you’ve …
- From Inconstancy to Dispassion… That’s where our real attachments are. And it’s not the case that you wait to the very end of your meditation, after your concentration powers have been fully developed, that you start thinking in these terms. You’ve got things interfering with your practice all the time that you’ve got to learn how to look at and get some dispassion for …
- Cherish Your Friends… We hear often that the Buddha teaches us non-attachment. Actually he teaches non-clinging, which is a different sort of thing. Clinging is when you hold onto something and create suffering. That, he said, is something you should try to understand. Look for the cause and let go. But in the meantime, you’ve also got the path, and that’s something you …
- Goodwill in Action… Finding all this old stuff, part of you has nostalgic attachment and the other part of you realizes that you’re cluttering up the place. If you suddenly had to move, you’d be a lot better off if your just let go, get rid of the stuff. Well, it’s the same with your mind. As the Buddha said, you have to realize …
- Maintaining Stillness… Exactly what is the process of ignorance and attachment and clinging and craving? Where do these things get involved so that these currents form? Sometimes there are currents that are the result of past action, but what you’re really interested in are the ones that are the result of present action—that are the present action, basically. You want to see what you …
- Mindful of Karma… So karma’s not one of those teachings that just happened to get attached to the teaching, like a leech from India that somehow latched onto the boat of Buddhism. It’s actually central to everything we do, because the Buddha is teaching a course of action. Putting an end to suffering is something you do. And so he has to explain what action …
- Occupy Your Space… When thoughts come into the mind, learn how to not get attached to them, especially the negative ones. You want the positive ones right now: the ones that are encouraging you: “Keep at it… keep at it… you can do it.” The thought that says, “I’ve been doing this for how many years now and don’t have much to show for it …
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