Search results for: "Attachment"
- Page 23
- 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 …
- Think… The letting go that comes from mindfulness—when you simply do as you’re told and let go—and the letting go that comes from seeing clearly that an attachment is not really worth it: Those are two very different things. The second requires your active thinking abilities. So keep them sharp. Thinking may be part of the problem, but you can train it …
- Acceptance… He’s so attached to her that he keeps the body in his room. The courtiers are upset by this. So they find a monk who’s psychic, who can find out where the queen has gone. It turns out she’s been reborn as a little tiny worm. So the monk gets the worm to talk to the king. He translates for the …
- Peace Requires Character… Because to be a being comes from desire, it comes from attachment—and it’s voracious. Insatiable. So the question is, how can we live in peace? We have to look within. And the beginning phase is to realize that our happiness cannot depend on the suffering of others. In other words, you have to eat with manners, to eat in a harmless way …
- Creating a World of Concentration… But if it doesn’t settle down on its own, you’ve got to figure out what it’s attached to. In other words, you have to use some insight to get the mind to settle down. If you see that your thoughts are going to a particular place or a particular issue, you’ve got to figure out how to cut that issue …
- Limitations… This is why the meditation asks us to step outside of ourselves for a while, to look at our lives like an anthropologist from Mars, so that we can see that certain habits that we’re most attached to are actually causing us the most pain. And if we can learn to see that we don’t have to follow those habits, that there …
- 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 …
- Load next page...
