Search results for: "Attachment"
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- The Best Place to Practice… When politicians are caught doing something bad, they point someplace else: “Well, somebody else is even worse.” And here the mind’s saying things around you are not perfect—which is true; but then, of course, if you got to a perfect place, you’d be so attached to it that you wouldn’t want to leave. And then you’d never really get …
- The Brahmavihāras Aren’t Enough… So again, the brahmavihāras on their own don’t induce dispassion—the desire to let go of all fabrications, all attachments. There are still things that you cling to with passion: your sense of yourself as the meditator, your sense of yourself as a Brahmā. So there’s more work to be done. So the brahmavihāras are a good focus for concentration. Some people …
- Love Me, Love My Defilements… You may have a sentimental attachment to some of them, a sense of nostalgia, but you can’t let that get in the way of letting them go. You have to realize that they really do a lot of harm in the mind. Only when you recognize that fact can you be free from them, free from that harm. And the fact that some …
- Not-self… You’re the one who’s attached to the food.” But if you can get to the point where you don’t need that food anymore, it’s not going to come clinging after you. That’s how freedom is found: by your letting go. Now, the special feature of not-self is that it differs from inconstancy and stress in one important area …
- Meditate to Win… Is the skin attached to the cow as it was before? Well, no. That’s an image for the awakened mind. It’s not a pretty image but it’s very effective. The skin stands for the outside sense spheres, the cow’s body stands for the inside sense spheres. There’s a sense of being disjoined, of a separation between the two, even …
- A Good Path to Be On… You’re going to have to ask questions of the mind about why it’s attached to this thing or that. When there’s pain, physical pain, is there some way you can be with the pain and not suffer from it? When there’s the pleasure of the concentration, how can you learn to be with it and not get overwhelmed by it …
- To Comprehend Craving… At the moment of death, when the mind can’t stay here in the body, when this being that you’ve created out of your attachment to the aggregates has to move on, if it hasn’t uprooted craving for sensuality, it’s going to go for sensual pleasures of almost any kind. People can be reborn as dogs—or even worse—through sensual …
- Look Around as You Follow the Trail… That’s what the Buddha calls “guarding the truth.” When you have a particular idea that you’re really attached to, ask yourself, “Where did you get that idea? What are you basing your ideas on?” You begin to realize that there’s very little that you have direct experience of. It’s mostly inference and guesswork. So, if you want to find the …
- The Right Medicine… Ultimately, it leads to a point where you let go of all your attachments, all your cravings. In other words, you get to the point where you can you see all the subtle intentions of the mind and you see them so clearly that you sense the stress that each of them carries, each of them causes, and you get to the point where …
- Equanimity on the Path… There’ll be a very subtle attachment there, a very subtle form of clinging, but you’ve got to get beyond all clinging. The proper way to respond is, “Oh, there’s this.” And you watch it. Ajaan Chah talks about an experience that may have been his awakening experience. He hit something that sounds very much like the deathless three times in a …
- Concentration: A Balancing Act… Right here we have this nest of diseases, yet we’re so attached to it. You have to ask yourself: Isn’t there something better? That’s one way of giving rise to a sense of samvega. You can just look at the world around you. There seem to be periods of light and then periods of darkness, then periods of light and darkness …
- Inner Critics… What’s the reason? Why do I undercut the purpose of my efforts?” Well, it’s our craving, our attachment, and our ignorance. Those are the things we’ve got to learn how to see through, the things we’ve got to learn how to abandon. The problem is that we have many conflicting desires for happiness, many conflicting ideas about how happiness can …
- What’s Worth Doing?… After all, this mind is attached to this body that needs to feed, and that needs to act in order to feed. It lives in its actions, but it doesn’t really see them. This is why the first principle of wisdom is learning how to step back and look at your actions, looking at your intentions to begin with. Because that’s where …
- Appropriate Attention Always… Try to see, which aggregate are you holding on to? What are you clinging to, and is it worth it? You can loosen up some of your attachment to the objects that you’re clinging to. Then you begin to turn around and look at the craving behind the clinging. As the Buddha said, we take craving as our friend. Everything it tells us …
- Bases for Success… You hold on to it just to the extent that you need it to do the work that needs to be done in your own mind, to find where the attachments are that cause suffering and to learn how to pry them loose. So we have to keep this in mind as we practice, because some of the things we’re doing seem to …
- Happiness Without Conflict… Why are we still so attached to these things? One of the reasons is that we think these are the only things we can do to find happiness: eat and maintain the body. The Buddha’s saying something really radical. There’s a happiness that doesn’t have to depend on these things. But it requires that you look very carefully at the drawbacks …
- Strength of Mindfulness… And as for any attachments that would pull you away from what’s important, you’re mindful to let them go. That’s when you see how important it is to keep your mindfulness strong—because in that way, it does become your refuge. Of the various qualities of the path, the Buddha focuses on mindfulness as your refuge so that all the other …
- Right View about Right View… If they didn’t offer any pleasure, no one would be attached to them. At the same time, there are also plenty of passages in the Canon that talk about the need to develop a skillful sense of self. And there are passages talking about not-self. Ajaan Lee, too, talks about seeing the side of things that is inconstant, stressful and not-self …
- Strengthening Concentration… It’s for whatever the form of your attachment to this physical lump here: pride, possessiveness, shame, whatever. If you really look into the body, what do you actually have there? All kinds of things you wouldn’t want to associate with. If your stomach was sitting on a chair next to you at the dinner table, you wouldn’t want to have a …
- True Honesty… But his friend says, “Well, I worked so hard at bundling up this flax and this is really my flax so I’m kind of attached to it, so I’m going to hold on.” So the first man throws away his bundle of silver and picks up a bundle of gold and takes that back. Well, you can imagine who really benefitted, whose …
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