Search results for: "Attachment"
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- Balancing Tranquility & Insight… You see the inconstancy of one level of concentration, and once you let go of whatever inconstancy you can detect in it, that takes you to a deeper level, then a deeper level, until finally you can abandon your attachment to concentration altogether. That’s when the dispassion is total, the cessation is total, and the relinquishment is total. You even give up the …
- Pride in Your Craft… Fortunately, there’s no moral stigma attached to the fact you’ve been breathing in an uncomfortable way. It’s simply a practical issue you haven’t been paying attention to. But if you pay attention, you can start seeing what kind of breathing genuinely does feel good now. It’s going to take a while to get really skilled at this, because sometimes …
- Stop Squirming… To comprehend the experience of stress and suffering, the pain, and the attachment and clinging that go with the pain, you have to watch them. You have to be able to sit with them. This requires a lot of endurance. Most of us don’t like sitting with the pain. As soon as there’s a pain, we move, run away. As a result …
- The Fourth Frame of Reference… This line of perceiving, this approach, is what finally gets you past all your attachments and brings you to something really solid, something unfabricated. At that point, you can put even these strategic perceptions down, for they’ve done their work. You’ve been carrying out these skillful duties to arrive at something that doesn’t carry a duty. As Ajaan Mun once said …
- The Same but Different, but the Same… Without that enjoyment, you can’t let go of your other attachments. So that’s one of the deeper ways in which the practice for everyone is all alike. The individual insights start out as very personal things, but then as you get deeper and deeper, you’re more in touch with the basic structure of how the mind creates suffering, regardless of what …
- Breath Meditation: The Third Tetrad… I was reading the other day someone commenting on how if you see aging, illness, and death as dangerous, it’s a sign that you’re attached, whereas instead you should just see aging, illness, and death as simply a part of this wonderful life we have, so you have to embrace it all. That’s not a Buddhist teaching. The Buddha says you …
- The Fourth Noble Truth… Just that fact can help peel away a lot of the appeal of things you were attached to before. But ultimately, you use that ability to step back to take apart the concentration itself—when you see that even in these really nice states of stillness, there’s still some fabrication going on. There’s still some inconstancy in the feelings and perceptions. Things …
- Sensitivity & Strength… In the course of trying to maintain this, you begin to see where your mind has its weaknesses, where your attachments are. This is what you have to question when you get pulled away by certain thoughts. You have to ask yourself, “Why should I allow that thought to pull me away? When those thoughts come up, how do they come up?” Sometimes they …
- The Reality of Your Thoughts… What are the perceptions that underlie that particular emotion? What are the ways of thinking and evaluating? Are they useful or are they not? What are they accomplishing? And again, if you can keep reminding yourself that even the emotion is only just a sketch of reality, it helps you loosen up your attachments to the particular details that you tend to focus on …
- Shoulds & Ideals… Sometimes they’re things we really like, we’re really attached to because we see them as positive. The cessation of suffering is something you want to witness, to see that there really is such a thing. But to see that, you have to develop the path—like we’re doing right now, practicing concentration. That’s one of the elements of the path …
- When You Practice on Your Own… As for the people who are attached to their stillness—who find stillness easy and don’t want to be bothered—they’ve got to learn how to think, because the stillness isn’t reliable. It’s like hiding out. You can hide out only for so long. You have to come back out again. If the affairs of the world disturb you, it …
- Full-Body Breath… We’re not so much attached to objects outside as we are to the mind’s fascination with them, wanting to think about them, fantasize about them, plan for them, figure out how to gain that particular pleasure. Often there’s a lot more pleasure involved in thinking about a piece of chocolate cake than there is the actual eating of the chocolate cake …
- Customs of the Noble Ones… What would those dangers be? Well, you can get attached to these things. On the other hand, if you’re content with very little, you might start getting proud of the fact that you’re content with little, and you might look down on those who are living more luxuriously. So there are dangers in both directions, and you have to be watchful for …
- Lessons from Jhana… Some people slip very easily from one level to the next, while others find that it’s pretty wrenching and threatening, because there’s some aspect of the way they construct things that they are very attached to. You see this as you move from the first jhana—where you’re talking to yourself basically about the breath, about how things are going—into …
- Always in Training… This way, the various defilements that would come about are being nurtured by too strong an attachment to the body, have less and less to hold onto. That’s because this kind of reflection is not just an antidote to lust. It’s also an antidote to pride around the body, an antidote to states of mind where you’ve made the mind a …
- The Raft of Concepts… Then, because it teaches you to recognize all your attachments wherever they are, it teaches you how to turn around and let go of right view itself. People often come to the Dhamma thinking that we’re here to get beyond concepts. But they run into concepts in the Buddha’s teachings, and therefore they feel that the Buddha’s being inconsistent. What’s …
- The Uses of Right Concentration… Your ability to tap into a sense of wellbeing inside is what makes it easier to follow the precepts, easier to pull yourself out of sensual attachments, easier to do whatever is required. So, as the Buddha often says: Settle in and indulge in the pleasure or the equanimity of that particular state of concentration. Learn to enjoy it. You’ll find that this …
- A Sense of Yourself… And it provides you with a fulcrum that you can use to pry your attachments away from those other things. When the work is done, you can let everything go. It’s like finishing any job. You’ve worked on a piece of furniture, but now that it’s done you can put down your hammer and saws. You’ve finished the dish that …
- Rebirth is Relevant… by our attachments, our clingings, and our cravings. This happens not only psychologically right now, but also in the way we define the new identity we assume after death, at rebirth. So because this act of self-definition is an action—and that’s how the Buddha primarily looked at it, as an action—you want to learn how to do it skillfully. You …
- But Not Sick in Mind… If you’re attached to your body, feelings, perceptions, thought fabrications, or consciousness, then as soon as these things change, you’re going to suffer. As long as you see that they’re yours—or that they’re you, or in you, or that you’re in them—you’re going to suffer because they’re sure to change. What you’ve got to …
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