Search results for: "Attachment"
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- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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.
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
- 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 …
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