Search results for: "Attachment"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. The Practice is Wherever There’s Mindfulness
     … Now it may mean that you have to give up some of your pleasures, some of whatever you’re attached to. Sometimes the skillful thing may be that you’ll have to die skillfully. We’re all going to have to die at some point. It doesn’t matter when. It doesn’t matter whether it comes early or late. What matters is how … 
  11. Appreciating Merit
     … But the culture of the noble ones goes beyond just contentment, to realizing the fact that as we depend on these things, we tend to get attached. There’s a danger there. There’s also the danger on the other side, where you’re very proud of the fact that you can get along with just very little and you look down on other … 
  12. Getting Familiar with Concentration
     … It really does become your center, and you can use it to peel away your attachments to all other things. Only when you’ve got so that you’re relying totally on this do you pull the rug out from under yourself. That’s when you’re in the right position to benefit from the Buddha’s teaching on insight in the ultimate sense … 
  13. W.W.B.R.
     … As the Buddha said, to really get beyond your attachments to things, you have to see them as separate. There’s your awareness, but the thought is something else. Okay, think about how things are inconstant. The thoughts come, and they’re going to go. Good things will come and they’ll go. So when the good things come, you take advantage of them … 
  14. The Kamma of Self & Not-Self
     … It’s only when you’ve brought the path almost to completion that you realize that the only attachment remaining is that sense of self—the self that’s directing things—and you see it simply as one more activity: things arising things passing away. And even when they’re skillful, those things are stressful. So you’re looking at them not in terms … 
  15. The Heart of the Teachings
     … The ultimate teaching is all about how all things are unworthy of attachment. Now, that’s true on the final steps of the path, but to get there, you have to follow this heart, and apply these principles at all times. Any place where your behavior could be criticized for a lack of circumspection, you take it to heart. You’re training your internal … 
  16. If at First You Don’t Succeed
     … This is similar to the fact that when you’re attached to something, it’s not the case that that thing has grabbed hold of you. You’re the one grabbing hold of it. The fact that you’re grabbing hold is why you’re not free. But when you do let go, you’re free—free from the limitations even of space and … 
  17. No Running Away
     … As for the body, before you drop attachment to the body, you’re got to learn that the body has its good side. We were discussing today: We sit with the body, sit with the breath and things get out of balance: The properties that can help bring it back into balance are right there in the body as well. If things feel too … 
  18. Breath Energies
     … And that’s where the real attachment is. So as you play with the breath like this, it’s not just play, as I’ve said before. It’s both play and working. You work with the breath because you’re doing something serious here. You’re learning important truths about the body and the mind. You’re playing because it’s fun and … 
  19. The Buddha’s Conventions
     … This is how you can pry apart your attachments and your clinging in a way that’s in line with the Buddha’s sense of what’s good enough. He said he never let himself rest content with skillful qualities until he found the real thing. And that’s the attitude he’s asking you to adopt, too.
  20. What Am I Becoming?
     … In fact, people who hold to the idea that what they are is something that’ll be annihilated at death, get very attached. They’ll do anything not to die. Even people who have a fluid idea about their gender, about their identity, hold on very tightly to that. There’s a lot of suffering there, too. “Self” is however you define yourself. If … 
  21. Terror & Revulsion
     … In Pali, it’s related to a word that means “terror.” What it comes down to is when you start reflecting on your life and the things you’ve been attached to, the things that you’ve been thirsting after and looking for: You come to see how pointless they all are. All that energy, all that effort focused on things that are not … 
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