Search results for: "Attachment"
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- 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 …
- Samsara… Once the mind has settled down, then you use the perception of inconstancy or impermanence, the perception of stress, the perception of not-self to pry away your attachments. In other words, notice the places where you tend to cling and analyze them to see that they really aren’t lasting, they’re really not as pleasurable as you thought they were. You don …
- The Skill of Letting Go… First you want to see, “What is the allure of this thing that I’m attached to? What do I find attractive?” Say, with sensuality: What, about a sensual fantasy, pulls you in, turns you on? The details will change from time to time and they’re not necessarily about the details of the body or the food that you’re lusting after. The …
- Motivation… If it suddenly came up, would you be ready to drop everything and just say, “Okay, that’s it! Let go,” without a lot of regret, without a lot of sticky attachments? One of the biggest regrets would be that you had the opportunity to practice but you didn’t make the most of it. You dawdled through the practice saying, “Well, I’ll …
- Battling Negativity… You will the end of your attachment to ordinary happiness by looking for a higher happiness. You keep that aim in mind and you learn to identify any thought in the mind that goes against it as a traitor—not a traitor in the sense of being evil, but just in the sense that it’s misguided. You can reason out whatever train of …
- Hope… When you get a spacious sense, you have to look and be very, very clear about the fact that there may still be some stress in there, still some inconstancy, still some attachment. There’s something that still gets in the way of true happiness. In other words, there’s work to be done. And that fact is what gives us hope: the fact …
- Willing to Learn… The problem was an inner lack of willingness to really sit down and watch and learn, to chip away at your own stupidity, to chip away at the things that you sometimes believe most strongly, are most strongly attached to. “It’s got to be this way”: That’s what the clinging mind says. And sometimes that’s precisely the problem: your unwillingness to …
- A Pleasure Without Stories… As the Buddha said, you can’t tear yourself away from your attachment to sensuality unless you’ve got this sort of pleasure. And it’s paccattam, as the Buddha said: It’s something that’s totally inward. It’s part of your experience that you can’t share with anyone else. How you feel your breath, nobody else can know. How much you …
- The Battle of Your Selves… Then, when you get latching on to something else, you can say, “I don’t want to feed that way, there are other ways to feed.” And the big strategy of the practice is to get you attached to one really good way of feeding, i.e., the concentration, so that as the mind slips out after other things, you see it in action …
- Recollection of the Buddha… Food that’s offered freely comes with no strings attached. There’s nothing unskillful in the way it’s obtained. So bit by bit by bit, he was able to get his mind around a totally different style of living, until ultimately he was even able to torture himself. When, after six years, he realized that that was not the way, he was able …
- Using Perceptions… Then, using that map, you can free yourself from your attachment to a lot of unskillful things. Then, of course, you have to put the map aside. That’s the fifth and final step. As the Buddha said, “All fabrications are inconstant; all fabrications are stressful.” But when you’re working on concentration, you don’t apply that map quite yet to the concentration …
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