Posts Tagged ‘attachment’
Do We Need Attachment to be Kind?
Does kindness require emotional attachment and identification with one another? Several prominent ethical systems promote the idea that our altruistic tendencies are based on emotional closeness and familiarity. We’ll look at a few of those systems, as well as a Buddhist alternative. I hope you’ll stick around for the third section where we’ll get to…
Read MoreBreaking Our Sense Sphere Attachments
What are the “sense spheres” and how do they get us attached in unskillful ways? How do we go about breaking these attachments? We’ll discuss all that in this video. Suttas referred to: Koṭṭhita (SN 35.232) Six Sets of Six (MN 148.28) Is There a Method? (SN 35.153) Check out my Patreon page!
Read MorePractice Circle: Keeping Your Practice Together
I won’t bore you with the details, but 2017 has been a tough year for me. Job loss, unemployment, an auto accident, the stress of adjusting to a demanding new job, physical injury, and more — it’s all come one after another. Dukkah, thick and fast. And, just as I needed my practice the most,…
Read MoreMeditating with Muse
As soon as I saw the first ads for Muse, the “brain-sensing headband” that provides users with feedback during meditation, I felt both intrigued and conflicted. After all, you don’t need a $300 electronic gadget to meditate. Would this be just one more mindfulness commodity, another plaything to become attached to? Would it be useful?…
Read MoreThe Importance of How We Translate: The End of Suffering
How readers understand Buddhism depends a great deal on how it is presented to us. This should be obvious. Though Buddhism teaches us to see for ourselves whether what we learn applies to our lives, how we practice, and what we look for when we practice is going to be affected by how…
Read MoreThe Snake: Translating Ancient Verses
Note: This post is shorter than it looks. Skip the large section of Notes if you wish. The challenge posed by an ancient verse like “The Snake” is that, even for its original audience, a great deal is left unsaid. Even if you lived in a time when you and everyone around you knew that…
Read MoreA Secular Understanding of Dependent Origination: #12 Aging and Death
The aging of beings in the various orders of beings, their old age, brokenness of teeth, grayness of hair, wrinkling of skin, decline of life, weakness of faculties — this is called aging. The passing of beings out of the various orders of beings, their passing away, dissolution, disappearance, dying, completion of time, dissolution of…
Read MoreWhat's Your Calling or Purpose in Life?
At the Wisdom 2.0 conference I heard several speakers talk about their life’s calling, and others refer to life’s purpose. Our society speaks about people’s life’s purpose as though it’s a real thing out there to be discovered, to give life your life meaning. In fact, there are books such as A Purpose Driven Life, Finding Your Life’s Purpose.
Read MoreWeekly Practice (Clinging & Craving)
Over the past few weeks, we focused on exploring how the feeling of me, mine, and I arise from the five aggregates: body, feeling tone, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. Each of these arise as a part of the human condition. In fact, they’ve been necessary to our evolution as a species. Without a feeling of I, you might not bother to feed yourself.
The problems of the aggregates comes from not recognizing them as the processes that go into the making of a perception of self, not recognizing that these are impermanent, and the focus for this week, how we cling to them and crave for more.
Read MoreGetting Knocked Off the Meditation Cushion: Unlearning Meditation
I recall going into the local sangha, taking a seat on my cushion, and the women in a chair beside me leaned down. “I notice whenever you come here that you always sit in a different place.” I smiled. “Yes, I’m not crazy about routine, and I enjoy challenging my comfort zones.” She looked at…
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