Search results for: "Attachment"
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- 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 …
- Don’t Worry, Be Focused… If you’re attached to certain things, you have to let go—and for the untrained mind that’s very difficult. You’re going to flail around, trying to grab onto things that you can’t grab onto anymore, and to weigh yourself down with concerns about things you can’t be responsible for anymore, which is why you have to practice ahead of …
- An End to Suffering… You’ll be less attached to your old ways of doing things because you’ve taken that larger view. And you’ll be more willing to take them on, simply as events in the present moment. When you actually do the work then you find that the results the Buddha promised really do happen. There’s not just suffering. There’s also the end …
- The Noble Eightfold Path to the Deathless… So when your attachment to the concentration and all the other factors in the path falls away, that’s when you have your first taste of the deathless. It’s at that point that the noble eightfold path has become complete. In fact, that’s what the definition of stream entry is: the noble eightfold path coming together, yielding the deathless. That’s what …
- Unskillful Thinking… What kind of thinking is skillful, true, and beneficial? What kind of thinking is not? And ask yourself why you’re attached to unskillful thinking. It’s like a letting an enemy into your house. You’ve got a traitor inside. Do you really want to hang around with that kind of thinking? Look as much as you can at the drawbacks of that …
- The World Does Not Endure… If it’s stressful, is it really worth holding on to as you or yours?” Now, if there were nothing else in the world besides these inconstant things, we’d say, “Well, I’ll hold on the best I can.” But the third noble truth is saying that if you let go of these attachments, you’ll find that there’s a happiness that …
- Staying, Moving, & Neither… There comes a point when the mind is fully trained in learning how to stay still and it realizes that the one issue remaining is its attachment to staying still. But you don’t want to run off moving either. So you’re trapped, as long as you see that those are the only alternatives. As long as you see things in terms of …
- See Yourself as Active Verbs… This is what the Buddha says we’re attached to, much more than to the actual objects, which is one of the reasons we suffer so much. Say you get into a relationship with someone else. You have plans about how good it’s going to be, but the actual person is very different from your plans. That’s one of the ways in …
- Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge… So what’s going on here? If it’s not your self, then why focus on it?” You’re focusing on it because simply being told that it’s not your self is not enough to make you get rid of your attachments to it. You’ve got to explore it. To what extent can you really control the breath? Push it and see …
- All Three Functions of Mindfulness… a place where you settle down with a sense of well-being that doesn’t have to depend on anybody else and puts the mind in a good position where it can see even more clearly where its attachments are and how it can let them go. So, it’s good that people are trying to be alert to the present moment and trying …
- Desire Is Part of the Path… You’re going to get attached. You’re going to get addicted. So stay away.” Even now, the jhāna merchants—the people who offer online retreats in jhāna—want to make it very clear that you’re not going to get addicted to the pleasure of jhāna. Well, a lot of people do get addicted, and it’s not a bad addiction. It’s …
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