Search results for: "Attachment"

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  2. Meaning & Purpose
     … We suffer because we’re attached to form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. But we can use those things to create the path, and we hold on as long as we need to. The Buddha makes a comparison with relay chariots. You take one chariot, you hold on, and it takes you a certain distance. Then you get into another one and that takes … 
  3. It’s All about Action
     … One of the important actions, of course, is learning to how to train your mind to be still and learn how to find where your clingings and attachments are and let go of them. As for what you’re going to find when you’ve let go of all your clingings, the Buddha gives just a few indications. He says that it’s a … 
  4. Respect for What’s Noble
     … After all, the Buddha’s teaching you to step back from something that’s very intimate and that you’re very much attached to: the way you feed, physically and emotionally. He’s holding you to a high standard, and there will be parts of the mind that resist. To overcome that resistance, you have to remind yourself: This really is a respectable, honorable … 
  5. For the Survival of True Happiness
     … So you want to make sure that you’re not attached to it. I think I’ve told you the story about Ajaan Fuang going around what he called the body shops at Wat Makut in Bangkok, where he taught. Saturday would be the day that people would come in the middle of the day to practice meditation with him. That meant that on … 
  6. One Thing at a Time
     … But if you’re looking for the stress in things, looking for reasons to let go of your attachments, then you hear them in a different way. You realize you can’t simply just tell yourself, “Let go.” You have to let go through understanding, which is why we focus on one thing at a time. Focus on the breath, and the issues of … 
  7. Beyond Imagination
     … When you finally delve down into your attachments and pry them away, pry them away, you find that you reach a happiness that you just cannot imagine. Imagination can go only so far. Creativity can go only so far. This is something uncreated, unimaginable. It’s really indescribable, except that the Buddha mentioned some of its good features: It’s total freedom, total bliss … 
  8. Why We Bow Down
     … That’s why we would be willing to adopt those three perceptions—inconstancy, stress, not-self—and apply them to the things we’re attached to. People sometimes say we can see these things all around us: Things are always changing—but do we know that there is nothing that doesn’t change? Maybe not in our range of experience, but perhaps there’s … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
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