Search results for: "Attachment"

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  2. The Flamethrowing Mind
     … It gets attached to things. What we normally think of as the activities of the mind are sometimes attributed to consciousness. The mind gets released, and a couple of suttas say that even consciousness gets released. So you could say the Buddha was inconsistent in his terminology, or you could say that he was offering different ways of analyzing what’s going on in … 
  3. Pleasure & Pain
     … The Buddha also observed that we tend to be attached to sensual pleasure because we can’t think of any other escape from pain. Well, this is what right concentration does: It gives us another escape from pain, so that we’re not so concerned about indulging in the pleasure of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. We give rise to an inner sense … 
  4. Patient & Inquisitive
     … We think feeding is a good thing; it’s our number one attachment. They say that during WWII, when people were in concentration camps, with the men segregated from the women, the men got tired of talking about sex very quickly. Food, however, became an ongoing conversation topic, one they never got tired of. So here the Buddha’s saying that the way we … 
  5. To Practice Dying
     … Even though it’s still an attachment and a form of clinging, still it’s a lot better than most of the things that come up. My own experience of almost dying came when I was electrocuted. A lot of images suddenly came up in the mind when I realized I couldn’t move. I was probably going to die from my own stupidity … 
  6. Cause & Effect
     … It’s not simply a matter of being able to do it once and say, “Okay I’m no longer attached to that, I’m no longer excited by that. I can move on to other things.” These are your basic nourishment as a meditator. You’ve got to look at the breath. See how the breath is comfortable, see how it’s not … 
  7. Guarding the Truth
     … That way, you can be less attached to a lot of your opinions. All too many of our opinions are constructed in ignorance. We fall back on them as if they were the genuine truth, because they’ve been there so long. But as Ajaan Suwat used to say, suppose you go into a dark cave and you take a light along with you … 
  8. Proactive with Pain
     … We practice letting go now, while we’re still strong, so that the attachments won’t weigh on the mind as the mind and body get weaker. We want to keep the mind as strong as possible. Learn how to separate your sense of awareness from your sense of the body, so that even though there may be a weakness in the body, the … 
  9. Healing Breath
     … It gets attached to it, and when the pleasure goes away, then it’s upset, struggles again to find pleasure. Here you use that tendency of the mind to get it to settle down, by supplying it with the pleasure that comes from the breathing, but then there comes a point where the body has been soothed, the mind’s been soothed, the sense … 
  10. Bringing Daily Life into the Practice
     … What really is worth doing? What’s not worth doing? When you start getting attached to ideas, memories, material things, you can remind yourself, “Okay, you’ve had these things before, you’ve let go of them before, you’ve come back to them again, and now you’re setting yourself up to miss them again. Haven’t you had enough?” If you think … 
  11. Mastering Pleasure & Pain
     … In the beginning, it’s very easy to get hungry for the pleasure and get very attached to it. But after a while you should begin to realize, okay, it’s there, you can tap into it when you need it, but there are times when you can’t be developing it. You have other duties to do. Or even though you can try … 
  12. Metta
     … When you have a very strong attachment to somebody, you have to step back a bit and say, “Well, what would be really for that person’s good?” Remembering that, as human beings, we live together for a while and then our ways part. Then we get back together again, and then our ways part again, and then sometimes we don’t come back … 
  13. Papañca
     … And from there, the Buddha says, you get into conflict, because once there’s an “I am”—you create it out of your sense of attachment to your body, to your feelings, your perceptions, your thought-constructs, acts of consciousness—that “I am” has to feed. It needs a world in which to feed. The problem is, you run into other beings, and they … 
  14. A Good Dish of Concentration
     … And as the Buddha says, when you get the mind really good at concentration and you’ve been able to use it to peel away your attachment to other kinds of feeding, then you turn around, look at it, and say: “Oh my gosh, this, too, is also form, feeling, perception, fabrication, consciousness. I’ve been feeding off of this.” And when, as a … 
  15. The Source of Goodness
     … I know a Dhamma teacher who was telling me that when his mother was dying, he was beside her bed, holding her hand, telling her, “Okay, you don’t have to hang on to things, you don’t have to be attached to things. Feel free to let go.” And the more he said, “let go,” the more she held on tightly to his … 
  16. The Buddha’s Investment Strategy
     … If you invest in your attachments, you’ll find that they give you some support for a certain amount of time, and then they start changing on you. As the Buddha said, everything fabricated – which means everything put together by causes – is inconstant. When you find yourself latching on to something inconstant, it can give you support only as long as it lasts, and … 
  17. The Image of the Raft
     … You’re going to get attached. So it’s better not to do concentration at all.” Well, the Buddha wasn’t one of those people. He actually made right concentration an essential part of the path. As he said, you can’t get past sensuality unless you have a pleasure like the pleasure that comes from being absorbed in the breath. If you don … 
  18. Artillery All Around
     … Another is the sense of attachment we get to the body: You come to realize that no matter how nice it looks from the outside, you look inside and there’s not much you’d want to look at. There’s just a little film of skin over the top that makes it presentable. As the Buddha once said, whoever would think, based on … 
  19. Directing Yourself Rightly
     … He says that the problem is that you get attached to your concentration, thinking that everything is fine as long as you concentrate, and the world out there is bad because it disturbs your concentration. He said you’ve got to remind yourself that the problem isn’t out there. The problem is inside—this tendency of the mind to get stirred up by … 
  20. What It All Comes From
     … For a lot of us, we’re more attached to our sense of our own identity than we are to the idea of a happiness that would be total and complete. But when you remember that your sense of identity came from the sense of lack and is maintained by a sense of lack, maybe you can change your attitude. Maybe a conscious happiness … 
  21. The Dignity of Restraint
     … What attachments in the mind would be good to give up? Could our mind survive perfectly well without the things we tend to crave? The Buddha’s answer is Yes. In fact, it’s better off that way. Still, a very strong part of our mind resists that teaching. We may give up things for a certain while, but our attitude is often, “I … 
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