Search results for: "Attachment"
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- Poison Your Fantasies… There’s a very naïve idea about insight that all you have to do is realize that things arise and pass away, things are made out of fabrications, and that’s enough to let go of any attachment you might have to them. But that’s like thinking that when there’s a sexually arousing picture on your computer screen, and you know that …
- Questions of Skill… We’re more attached to our fantasies than we are to the things we actually encounter. You get to know these fantasies really well by saying No to them as you try to get the mind into a state of concentration, as you’re trying to replace your fascination with sensuality with fascination about how you feel the body from within. That’s called …
- Guardian Meditations… Why is that? How can the mind see these things, know these things, and still turn a blind eye to them? The purpose of this contemplation is to see that whatever thoughts of lust or pride or attachment you have for the body are really misplaced. The problem, of course, is not with the body. It’s not making any claims on you. You …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… being content with what you have in terms of food, clothing, and shelter—not priding yourself on your contentment, but simply realizing that the contentment is something you need to develop in order not to get sucked into the dangers of being attached to food, clothing, and shelter, or wanting more than what you’ve got. After all, this is how any culture makes …
- Therapy for the Mind… You learn how to delight in abandoning your attachment to the mind’s old familiar diseases—to recognize them as diseases and then to delight in developing the qualities that can outwit them. After all, the defilements have their reasons and their clever tricks. They have their strategies for making you fall for them. One of them is, of course, the idea, “Well, it …
- Twigs & Branches… This body that you’re so attached to, this is what it’s made up of: hair of the head, hair of the body, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, all the way down the line. Here again, you use that contemplation to get yourself away from the appearance of the body to get more interested in how you experience the body from within. Then you …
- Trading Up… That kind of thinking constitutes a huge portion of the junk up in the attic, but of course it’s something we’re really attached to. When you talk about right resolve, it’s easy to say that, yes, you’d like to learn how not have so much ill will for other people and you’d like to learn how not to be …
- Not What You Are, What You Do… You can get very much attached to that kind of passivity and still be stuck with all your problems. So instead we bring more and more knowledge to the process of breathing and how we use our thoughts around the process of breathing. Sometimes you hear that our thinking, which is based a lot on language, is the reason why we suffer, that we …
- Faith in the Buddha’s Awakening… The being is made of attachment and its sustenance is craving. The image the Buddha gives is of a fire that goes from one house to another. He says, the fire leaps from one house to the next based on the wind, based on the air. That’s its sustenance. And as to what this “being” is, though, the Buddha doesn’t answer the …
- A Haven for Inner Wealth… You don’t just look at the mind and watch things coming and going, seeing something good coming, and saying, “Well, I don’t want to be attached to it,” and then let it go. If something good comes, you want to maintain it. In fact, that’s one of the duties of mindfulness: to give rise to good states in the mind and …
- Refuge in an Admirable Friend… Don’t try to get attached to the big waves; don’t get upset about the small waves. They’re just waves coming, coming, coming, coming, doing their thing. But that’s not an image you’ll find in the Buddha’s teachings. We’re going someplace. We’re on a path. The path will take us to a place where we finally can …
- A Larger Perspective… As for all those other entanglements and the vines and the elastic bands that pull you and attach you to other things, you just want to cut right through them. Be here with the body in and of itself. We don’t have much of a vocabulary for this in English, this experience of how the body feels from within. They call it “qualia …
- The Dhamma Wheel Shakes Up the World… If we really wanted to depict the Dhamma wheel properly, we’d have to attach a little motor to it to keep it in motion, because the Dhamma wheel keeps spinning. As the devas said, nobody can stop it. It just keeps spinning and spinning. That’s why the Dhamma wheels on King Asoka’s columns have so many spokes: The sculptors tried to …
- Inner Negotiating Skills… the way your senses process things—the way your mind processes sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, creates narratives out of them, creates worldviews out of them, creates all kinds of attachments out of them. In some cases, these narratives are actually useful but in a lot of cases they can cause harm. So you’ve got the opportunity to learn a lot right …
- Distractive Thoughts… When you’ve got this sense of fullness here, a lot of other attachments will just drop away. So learn to use both pleasure and pain as part of your arsenal, part of your meditators’ toolkit, so that—as the Buddha said in the discourse where he was describing these five ways of dealing with distracting thoughts—when you’ve mastered these five methods …
- Equanimity Isn’t Everything… Then there’s the problem of getting attached to the equanimity itself. We hear about awakened people who are extremely equanimous, but it’s not the case that the equanimity is the essence of their attainment. After all, the Buddha didn’t say nibbana is the ultimate equanimity. He said it’s the ultimate happiness. The fact that awakened people have a basis for …
- Inconstant, Stressful, Not-self… This is where, as Ajaan Mun says, our attachment to what’s good gets in the way. The concentration is good, but it’s not totally good. It still lacks something in terms of providing true happiness because you’ll find that it, too, is inconstant. Even the pleasure of the concentration has some stress. So why would you want to lay claim to …
- Strength of Conviction… But when you look to see things in terms of the four noble truths—where we don’t think in terms of “beings” going through “worlds,” but simply events in the mind—it makes it a lot easier to cut away your attachment to things that you’ve held on to for so long. That’s where you find the strength of your conviction …
- Body Contemplation Is Compassionate… When you leave this body, where are you going to go? If the mind has lots of attachments, it’s just going to grab onto whatever comes past, out of desperation. There’s work to be done so the mind doesn’t grab on like that. You really can make a difference in how you die by the preparatory work you do right now …
- A Sense of Yourself… Ask yourself, what’s getting in the way of the peace? What attachments? What obsessions in the mind? And what can you do about them? How can you see through them? There’s part of the mind that holds on to them because you think it’s worth holding on. You’ve got to see through that. Even with some really negative stuff, stuff …
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