Search results for: "Attachment"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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 … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. Staying Still
     … its attachment to this, that, and the other thing. This is why, in the section on concentration in Ajaan Lee’s book on mindfulness, he talks a lot about developing a sense of samvega as an important element in getting the mind to settle down. In other words, you look at the things that would pull you out and you see there’s nothing … 
  13. Happy to Be Here
     … If you look carefully at the mind, you realize that you’re not attached so much to the specific sensations as you are to thinking about them, planning for them. Often with the pleasures that we go for: When you actually look at the pleasure itself, there’s not much there. But there’s so much build-up, the advertising you do in your … 
  14. Cutting the Fetters
     … You get really attached to the concentration, but then you begin to see that it has its limitations. This is when the Buddha says that you start perceiving it in terms of being inconstant, stressful, not-self, and variations on those three perceptions: being empty, a dart, a disease, fleeting. As you begin to contemplate the drawbacks, the mind inclines for something that’s … 
  15. Where Perceptions Can Take You
     … The perceptions that lead to penetration, of course, are the perceptions having to do with seeing all things as fabricated and unworthy of attachment. You see that there’s an intentional element that goes into everything you’ve experienced. You also realize that everything fabricated through that intentional element is going to end. To induce dispassion toward fabrications, the Buddha sometimes talks in terms … 
  16. Less is More
     … As the Buddha said, when he gained awakening, he dwelled with an unrestricted awareness, free from any attachments, free from any constriction. It’s the greatest wealth there is.
  17. Working with Fabrication
     … Then you also use right view to step back from the fabrication of right view, to take apart any attachment you might have to right view. That’s what gives you freedom. So that’s the skill of the practice: You start by learning which fabrications are useful for the purpose of letting go of unskillful fabrications. These can deal with anything, any of … 
  18. Generating Desire
     … Once when I was in Laguna someone complained, “Why is there so much on the drawbacks of sensuality?” Because we’re so strongly attached to sensuality. You have to keep hammering the point home that sensual desire carries heavy drawbacks: all the trouble that laypeople go through in work, for instance, working and working and working to get paid so that they’ll have … 
  19. Why We Train the Mind
     … As the Buddha said, when you get into a deep level of jhana and you’ve mastered it, you begin to look to see what in this state of jhana, in terms of the five aggregates, is still stressful, inconstant, empty? That way, you’ll be able to get rid of your attachments and find a happiness that doesn’t have to latch on … 
  20. Even Animals Can Be Trained
     … You’re on this side of the river where he says you’ve got the dangers of your attachment to the aggregates and sense media: the way you identify things on this side of the river as your self. And then they turn on you. But then there’s the other side of the river, where you’re safe. There’s no nibbana raft … 
  21. Working at Home
     … If you take the meditation into your daily life—in other words, trying to keep centered in your center as you go through your various activities—you begin to see very clearly where your attachments are, where the asavas are, the ways your mind flows out to things, barging right through the walls of your concentration. This means you’ve got a double duty … 
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