Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Thubten Gyatso opens this 51-minute talk by establishing the traditional Buddhist context for all teachings—reflecting on the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and cultivating universal compassion—then turns to the core topic: recognizing and working skillfully with attachment and desire. He explains how attachment mistakes conditioned, impermanent pleasures for genuine happiness, leading to suffering through exaggeration of the object’s qualities, clinging to false permanence, and blindness to faults. He contrasts attachment (self-centered, agitating, based on wrong perception of independence) with genuine love (selfless, peaceful, wishing only the other’s welfare). Drawing on a letter to his niece who’d been rejected by a partner, he teaches renunciation—not as grim rejection of life, but as contentment and freedom: the ability to experience pleasure wisely without being trapped by craving or reorganizing one’s life around objects and people. Attachment is compared to oil in cloth (hard to remove through repeated habituation), while renunciation brings complete freedom even in the face of illness, loss, and death. For practitioners seeking to cultivate wisdom and compassion.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 2010 02 04 D.mp3
UUID: f5703ffe-103b-4196-94ff-ba61e7dad96c
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Misc teachings (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2010-02-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 51.1 minutes
Words: ~5,938
At the beginning of every talk, when we’re discussing the Buddha’s teachings, it’s customary to reflect in our minds the qualities of the Buddha himself and the teachings and of those practitioners who have maintained the practice of the teachings through the ages up until now. Even two thousand five hundred years later, are still practitioners who have the inner realization of the teachings. Is the essential purpose of the Buddha having given the teachings in India is to show people the way in which they can understand their own minds, gain control of their minds, and destroy the disturbing, afflictive emotions from their minds by replacing them with wisdom, love, compassion and so on. So, to eliminate the causes of suffering and to cultivate the causes of liberation and freedom freedom from the wheel of life and to achieve the capacity to actually put one’s love and compassion into practice by guiding others, by showing others the way. So always traditionally, when we started Buddhist teaching, remember the two things: qualities of the Buddha, the Dharma and the assembly of practitioners or the Sangha and the supreme altruistic thought of universal responsibility that it’s important to abandon self centered clinging and grasping to one’s own personal life and one’s own happiness and to open one’s heart, one’s mind to the need of all universal beings.
Seeing suffering that they’re experiencing as a result of ignorance, anger, attachment and so on and making the wish, the strong intention that through this discussion may I achieve Buddhahood in my own right, which is my full potential, so that I can then take my place in the ranks of the countless Buddhas of the past and be continually there when sentient beings are in need. And the reason why it’s logical to develop this sense of personal responsibility for the suffering of others is because all beings have been so kind to us in previous lives, where we’ve had every relationship with other living beings, as our mother, our father, our husband, our wife, our children and so on. So, we are intimately related with each other. Even if we can’t remember past lives, even if we don’t believe in past lives, still it’s a reality that we are closely interconnected and therefore it is sort of just conventionally it’s wrong to ignore our parents, our past parents, when they’re in trouble. As their children, it’s sort of natural that we should take responsibility to look after them in the hour of need.
So, the Lamas often recite a prayer in Tibetan, but I think for us we just reflect upon the great qualities of the Buddha, the Dharma and the assembly of practitioners, and try to generate the altruistic thought in our own minds as being the motivation for engaging in this talk tonight, in this discussion tonight on the subject of attachment and desire. Okay, so now the subject recognize and deal with the desire and attachment in our own minds, how to, through understanding, fix our minds, how to avoid the suffering that it engenders, the pain and hurt, that the disturbing emotion of attachment can cause our own mind and also cause us to inflict upon others, intentionally or not. I think as a start we should remember that whatever we experience in life, whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant, is not just a chance meeting between ourself and the pleasant or unpleasant person or object in our life. There is a subjective cause which connects us with every unpleasant or every pleasant object. And that subjective cause is a tendency within our mind that has been laid down in past lives to be to move towards or to meet the various objects, pleasant or unpleasant.
The term is called karma but karma simply refers to the, I guess you can call it the ongoing momentum of activity that we’ve engaged in past lives that we inherit from past lives because our mind comes from past lives, not coming from parents or from our brain, but our mind is an entity in its own right and we inherit it with so many tendencies towards experiencing pleasant or unpleasant objects. The mere fact that we are human is a strong indication that we died very well in our past life. To be born human requires the ripening of very powerful, virtuous karma, strong positive karma. It’s much better to have a human body than the body of an animal or as a wandering hungry spirit or in the hells. Those rebirth states are extremely limited in their ability to meet with pleasure.
And there’s a very strong tendency to meet with painful, difficult situations. There There are other rebirth states, sort of, in terms of pleasure, you would call them superior to human rebirth states, where the sensory pleasures and even the mental pleasures are far superior to what we can even imagine as human beings. And in all of these, the whole spectrum of realms, from intense suffering in the hells to supreme bliss in the God realms, is all the ripening of karma. It’s all connected to the karma of the individual beings who are born in those places. So, as humans, we have to see that we do have the opportunity, which sort of, you know, we have a balanced opportunity to meet with pleasant and unpleasant objects.
And you can see within human society there are those who, just as we’re all humans, but some are far better off in terms of their ability to experience pleasure than others. And also it’s changing all the time. Some can reach the peak and then fall completely into situations of great pain and misery. Some can grow up in situations of great deprivation and pain and then their life can turn around and the objects of pleasure come. So, we all have a very mixed and varied karmic inheritance from past lives.
But what I want to point out is that we shouldn’t take pleasure for granted. We cannot experience any pleasant experience without having this ripening of virtuous karma in our minds to connect us with the object of pleasure. So now, if we take a more general look at the objects of pleasure, Buddha taught, his first teaching was the teaching of the four noble truths: true suffering, true origin of suffering, the true cessation of suffering and the true path which leads to the cessation of suffering. True suffering doesn’t refer just to the pain and anguish and suffering that occurs in the minds of sentient beings. True suffering is like a term which refers to whatever arises or comes into existence as a result of karma and disturbing mental emotions or mental afflictions.
Emotions based upon ignorance of reality and the self grasping ignorance that arises from that anger attachment and so on. So, it’s not only the unpleasant things, pleasant things in our environment are called true sufferings. They belong to the first noble truth because they are derived from the collective karma and the disturbing emotions of all the sentient beings who experience the pleasant things in this world. Now, so therefore, karma is actions that are engaged in through ignorance. The fundamental ignorance of reality.
And within that ignorance there is exaggeration or projection of unreal qualities upon the world, either negative or positive qualities that we see in the world, and we act according to our confused perception of the world. And those actions are karma. When we go beyond the influence of self grasping ignorance, we’re still on the path, we’re not yet even in nirvana, not to mention enlightenment, but there is a time when one’s actions come through wisdom seeing reality. And those actions are not called karma. They’re actions, they’re mental actions, but they don’t lead to rebirth in the wheel of life.
They don’t lead to the arising of environmental pleasure or pleasant objects or unpleasant objects, they lead the individual towards nirvana and eventually to full Buddhahood. So, and there is no suffering at all associated with those, with the experiences that arise from such actions that derive from wisdom. But from when there is ignorance, confusion, there is always a degree of suffering that arises from our karma. And so, in Buddhism what we call pleasure and pleasant objects actually are true sufferings because they’re derived from confused minds. And so, if we can think of any object, you know, in the world that we regard as being desirable, something I must have, something which is going to give me happiness, that already is a mistaken thought because there is no guarantee that the person we desire, or the experience we desire, the taste, the touch, the possession, you know, whatever it is, there’s no guarantee that that is going to make us happy.
In fact, inherent in all of the objects of the world is impermanence, that nothing will last forever. Everything is changing moment by moment. We see the happiness a young child gets from just having balloon. There’s something great to play with and a lot of joy and fun. But we all know that it won’t be long before the pop’s heard and the balloon’s gonna burst and the child’s gonna start crying.
The same goes for our new car, for our new house, for our clothes, our new partner, whatever it is, our job, whatever we cling to and play with expecting continual happiness is going to pop one day because it’s impermanent. It cannot last. It cannot last unchanged. And even if it’s still around we’re going to go pop and our body is going to die and our life will come to an end. So, is inherent, this impermanence is sort of a quality of the things that we grasp at and cling to with the belief that they’re permanent.
I mean why does the baby cry so much? Because the baby really thought that the balloon would not burst and it would be there to play with again and again. And even though intellectually, of course, we know that things wear out, that people grow old and people die, still we have a belief that it’s not going to happen yet. And we cling to this idea that things will stay as they are. And the evidence that we all suffer from this obviously wrong belief is our distress.
When we do lose things. When, you know, a house burns down, or you know, the things we really depend upon for happiness let us down, they change. Or we die, or relatives die. The degree of worry and pain and grief and sorrow that we’re thrown into is clear evidence that we have blinded ourselves to the reality of change. Then, the things that come from karma and disturbing emotions are impure in as much as they don’t have the purity that we project.
Like maybe objects of art or anything, the person we fall in love with. We project purity, perfection in the person or the bauble that we want to pay so much money to acquire and to have and to show to others. I’ve got this wonderful thing. This is another thing. We know that they’re not intellectually.
We can say there is no perfection but underneath we believe that this is really perfect. But they’re not perfect. There is impurity, especially in those people we trust to always be with us, to give us happiness, to be sources of comfort and etc. It’s all too evident that our beliefs are beyond reality. That there is no guarantee that a person will continue to love us.
They will see somebody else and love somebody else, and not just reject us but even come our enemies completely antagonistic. So, the pure love, the pureness of the objects we love and we attach to is not there. It’s a deluded projection. Also, the objects of pleasure are true sufferings. Because as we are confused we cannot experience pleasure without becoming attached, without clinging, desire, not wanting to separate from the object of pleasure.
That is a type of suffering. There’s the pleasure, alright, but that pleasure is inseparable from a sense of unease, worry that we’re going to lose the object or we’re going to be separated from the object or somebody else is going to take the object away from us. So, we cannot experience happiness and pleasure without instantly worrying about losing the object. So, in this way the object of pleasure is called true suffering because it engenders disturbing emotions of attachment and clinging. Also the very pleasure itself.
We talk about subjective pleasure that we get from the object. We might be pleasure seekers so we experience the object and discard the object. And people can do that with partners, they can do it with cars, with clothes, with whatever object of pleasure. We can just be total pleasure seekers. But the pleasure is not really true perfect happiness.
It’s a type of suffering because again, it is something that comes up and it instantly fades away as the object goes away. And so we have this longing, I want it again, again, or a different variety. So the mind is actually disturbed by pleasure. The ignorant, confused mind is disturbed by pleasure. Inseparably this disturbance comes.
You know, the party is over. When the high inevitably gives rise to a low, a down. So we’re going in cycles, up and down. So pleasure itself, in Buddhist description, is a true suffering. When experienced by a mind of confusion, a mind confused by ignorance, not knowing reality.
And why is all this happening? The third or the fourth factor, you know, I’ve talked about impermanence, impurity, suffering, and the fourth factor of these objects that come from karma and afflictions, is that they’re selfless. Which means that they don’t exist in their own right. They’re not independent, self existing entities, neither ourself, nor the person to whom we’re attached, or the object to which we’re attached. Nothing exists in its own right.
But our confused mind projects existence in its own right. That this is a true, independently existing person or object and I am a true independently existing person and this is mine. I want you know, we identify with the object and we cling to it believing that it’s truly me and truly my possession. That true existence, which means existence in its own right, is just a figment of our imagination. Just as a beautiful sunset is something to be enjoyed, but we all know that it is simply the result of causes and conditions and very soon the lovely pinks and all the colors of the sunset are going to become grey, black and disappear.
So, there is an in dependence upon different causes and conditions. There is the appearance of something beautiful and the subjective joy of experiencing that, but then it goes. So, actually, our human body, our whole life, is no different to a beautiful sunset. A result of of karma, then this body was conceived by our parents, a stream of consciousness came from a previous life connected with the embryo or the conceived egg in our mother’s womb and we grew up. But really, our whole body, our whole life is just the temporary coming together of different causes and conditions with the architect of karma in our mind at the background and then we live our life experiencing pleasure, pain and so on and then we’re going to fade away just like the sun set.
Nothing will be left behind that is me. Absolutely nothing. There has been no essence throughout life which is truly me. Even no essence which is truly mother, truly father, brother, sister, husband, wife. We are all sunsets.
We’re all temporary appearances orchestrated by karma and the emotions in the mind but with no true essence. That’s what life is all about. But we don’t believe that. We see our mind through ignorance clings to very strong, real, true me and you and me and my lover, my partner very strongly and mother and father. See them as truly existing entities in their own right and so we have so many emotions of attachment, anger, jealousy, pride in relationship to all of these, not just people, but even the objects in our life.
So, we want to discuss a desire or attachment which are synonyms and I wanted to just use that introduction to talk about the objects of our desire. Okay? Now, the definition of attachment or desire in Tibetan is dö chag, is it is a disturbing emotion that sees contaminated object, that’s something which arises from karma and afflictions, as attractive and wishes to acquire it. This object can be an inanimate thing or it can be another person, you know, something attractive, something which promises to give me pleasure. It’s contaminated.
I’m not talking about if we reflect upon attaining nirvana, reflect upon the uncontaminated bliss of the path, then that is an uncontaminated object. So, the desire to achieve wisdom, to achieve compassion and love, to achieve the realizations of the path, to achieve nirvana, to achieve enlightenment, that desire is not the desire that’s defined here. It’s not a disturbing emotion. Right? So, a few points that I’ve put in these notes: Attachment is a state of non-aversion to cyclic existence.
So, cyclic existence or saṃsāra is the wheel of life determined or that arises as a result of the karma and disturbing emotions of the individuals who are dying and being reborn, dying and being reborn. Why are we reborn? Because of our past actions. Usually associated with attachment. You know, we die, even if we had a miserable life, there’s still some clinging to life, to me, to existence.
Or clinging to the belief that I will go to heaven or I will have a happy rebirth. It was a strong clinging to existence and that ripens the karma, the karmic imprints to exist, to be born in one of the various realms, either pleasant or unpleasant, according to the type of karma that will be ripened. So, when we say attachment is a non aversion to cyclic existence, even if we’re dying of cancer and, you know, we’re sort of having a lot of pain and we want to die, still there is this belief in some sort of there is an underlying clinging to the belief of happiness, of ongoing peace and freedom from pain. So wanting to die is not the opposite of attachment. There’s still this sense of I will go to peace, I will go to happiness.
And it’s a very deep, innate sense that has driven us through our whole life, been this inner yearning, this longing for peace and happiness within this world. Aversion to cyclic existence is renunciation. Renunciation is where we recognize the reality of the control of karma and disturbing emotions. And the way in which the wheel of life is a trap, it’s a jail. There is no definite peace and happiness as long as there’s confusion in the mind.
So, with that wisdom, with that insight, one generates aversion to being reborn again and again and turns one’s mind towards attainment of nirvana or enlightenment. And so that is called renunciation of clinging to life, clinging to existence. So attachment is the opposite of that. No matter how many times we fall, we pick ourselves up again and one partnership breaks up, we start looking around for the next. Or even we have an existing partnership, we start looking around for something better, something different.
No matter, you know, whatever it is, we’re never satisfied. Our mind is constantly functioning under the belief of life is great, life is what was the slogan? Life is to be enjoyed, get out there and enjoy it or something. Our whole society is telling us you have a right to be happy, you must be happy, buy my product and you’ll be happy. It’s a lie.
This is describing attachment. First of all, it’s a state of really seeing that pleasure is worthwhile in life. We should go out there and just enjoy ourselves. Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t enjoy ourselves. But I’m saying that we should enjoy ourselves with wisdom rather than ignorance.
And it’s the wisdom that I’m to talk about tonight. So we can enjoy pleasure without becoming trapped. I’m not saying give up all happiness and even the pursuit of happiness. I’m Live your life skillfully and you will be able to avoid the terrible downs that occur in life when the object of pleasure goes away. And not get trapped by pleasure when it happens but just experience it as it is.
Say, this is the ripening of my good karma. Great. And don’t exaggerate the situation too much. Don’t build yourself this lovely paradise in the sky and then try and live in it. Too dangerous.
So, second thing about attachment is that this mind of attachment exaggerates the quality, exaggerates the object of attachment. Like another person, we see more important, more beautiful than it he or she actually is. So there’s this exaggeration or projection of more attractive qualities than are actually there. Then, attachment doesn’t want to separate from the object. It feels, I need, I want, I don’t want to be, I don’t want this to go away, I must have.
Attachment wants happiness but it results in suffering by disturbing the mind. In the definition, it’s a disturbing emotion. When attachment arises, the mind is disturbed. It is longing, wanting, needing, pining for. It’s not love.
We call it love. Oh, I’m in love. I can’t forget the person. They’re in my mind all the time. But when we’re not with the person we say we’re in love, we’re miserable because we want to be with them.
Nobody else dare talk to the person that we love or look at them and we’re disturbed. We’re clinging. This is attachment. Love is just a pure wish for another to be happy. Attachment is a wish for me to be happy.
And the person we say we love just happens to be a source of my pleasure. This person enhances my self image, my ego, gives me physical pleasure, gives me money, love, attention makes me feel important, makes me feel wanted. Oh, I love! So, we’re obsessed with me, me, me, what I get from that person.
That’s not love, that’s attachment. Love is when we just purely want the other person to be happy. We delight in their happiness. And that love doesn’t disturb the mind. That love makes the mind peaceful.
This giving and being kind and nice and smiling that never agitates the mind. It makes the mind peaceful. So that’s is true love. And the trouble with us is our emotion that we call being in love is a mixture of real love and attachment. And it’s the attachment which contaminates our relationships.
Alright, more will come. Attachment is blind to the negative qualities of the object. When we are overwhelmed by attachment, we see somebody, they’re perfect, we just blind ourselves to their negative qualities, to their faults, which unfortunately, you know, maybe later and we get to know them more and more and we maybe establish relationship and we start to see the faults and we’re shocked. I mean our friends have been telling us for ages, don’t tell me he’s wonderful or she’s so excellent. And then with our pride we might pretend that no, they’re not at first, they don’t have this fault.
And we rationalize their misbehavior and we place ourselves in this whole psychological situation of total unreality. So, attachment does this: it won’t allow us to admit that the object that we’ve invested all our hope in is actually flawed. But, as we’ve hopefully already established, there’s no such thing as perfect partner, perfect person when minds are under the control of self centered ignorance. Love compassion are positive emotions which don’t exaggerate. They’re only concerned with the welfare of others Seeking virtue, especially the realisations of the path, is not attachment if the mind is peaceful.
This is an important point. If we’re thinking, oh, I’ve got to achieve concentration, I must achieve bodhicitta, I must achieve nirvana and the mind is sort of agitated, there is attachment. What we have done is we’ve invented nirvana as being some heaven, some wonderful, blissful place to go to and we’re attached to that thought. So, can check up. In general, because nirvana is the cessation of all suffering and its causes, nirvana is if we are aware of that, then the aspiration to attain nirvana only will be a peaceful state of mind.
But if we feel we’re agitated, I must see Geshe la, the Guru, the Lama, you know, and we get very agitated by wanting to be with the teacher. There is attachment. There is attachment there. And that’s to be recognised and eradicated. And we have attachment, so we have got to really watch our minds.
Attachment seeks the pleasures of all three realms of saṃsāra. That’s referring to the realms of rebirth, there’s a desire realm which includes most of the ones we’re familiar with. And then there are two realms called the Form and Formless Realm where one is reborn in these very ethereal states as a result of karma created through attachment to meditative levels of concentration. That’s all. So that’s what the three And they’re temporary rebirths.
Last for a long time, but then one dies and one can be reborn as a human or animal, wherever else one’s karma will lead one. Now, other afflictions are easy to abandon. Like anger is easy because we recognize the faults of anger. It’s pretty easy to see. And of jealousy and pride, they’re fairly easy to recognize and to want to get rid of those disturbing emotions.
And so that’s likened to if we have some dirty clothes, the gross particles of dirt, they go with the first rinse. But attachment is deep in our mind, it’s like oil in the clothes. Much harder to eliminate from our mind. Because attachment really believes its projections of true happiness and I want happiness, I must have happiness. And we’re continually feeding our attachment.
We feed each other’s attachment. What do people like? They’re attached to this. Let’s give them more. We feel we can make them happy by giving them the things that they like.
So we feed desire. And attachment pines for objects that we don’t have. We are so habituated to wanting, wanting, wanting to indulging in the pursuit of pleasure. It’s human pastime. And so it’s hard to see the fault of attachment.
So it’s like oil on cloth, it’s difficult to remove from the mind. Alright. So now, actually the notes that come subsequent are actually mostly a letter that I wrote to one of my nieces who had just been rejected by the guy she’d been living with for some time. And I was in Mongolia somewhere, a long way away and she wrote a very distressed letter. So, I wrote she knows a lot about Buddhism so this more or less is what I wrote to her.
So I said a friend once said to me that those who stop having attachment or desire become like grandmothers and others think that they’re queer in the head. No more fantasy, no more fun. This was actually a Mongolian person who said this to me. So, I said attachment to another person is a self centered, agitating emotion that craves to always be with that person, to have the pleasure of their affection, companionship and touch. Attachment causes the roller coaster fall from bliss to misery when we separate from the object, or the ongoing misery of not being able to attract the special person of our dreams.
Attachment is the poison that causes the downside in the experience of being in love. Pure love is free from self centeredness and attachment. It’s an outgoing sense of warmth in the heart that takes delight in the happiness of others and in making them happy. If we want happiness and do not want misery, we need to cultivate our capacity for loving and abandon our neurotic tendency towards falling into attachment. So that’s sort of like the beginning.
So how do we abandon our neurotic tendency towards attachment? As I’ve mentioned, the opposite of attachment is renunciation, mental state of peace, and contentment and freedom. Really contentment is the key word here. Content in what we’ve got. Not wanting more, wanting variety, wanting something different, but being content and being comfortable.
We have to be comfortable. We can’t practice the path if we’re not happy. If the mind is unhappy because unhappy because there’s something lacking, something missing or some pain, it’s very difficult to practice the spiritual path of inner growth of wisdom and compassion and love. So, we are human. We have human human bodies.
We have human minds. And it’s essential to make the mind peaceful and happy. So, we should not become recluses and reject anything which, oh, I can’t do that, that might make me attached. We’ve had attachment since beginning of this time. And we’ve got to recognize that if the mind is happy from pleasure then turn that happiness towards the inner growth, the spiritual growth, the study and the reflection and the meditation that’s required.
So don’t be afraid of pleasure but be afraid attachment to that pleasure and the object of pleasure. Okay? Renunciation is the ability to be able to experience peace, to experience whatever we’re experiencing in life without being really disturbed about wanting to reorganize my life, my possessions, my house, my circle of friends, etcetera, etcetera. And being able to channel channel the majority of our energy towards the cultivation of love and wisdom and compassion and so on. There is so much freedom in that.
Those who are caught up in their fantasies of ‘I must have this and that’ and so on, they have no freedom. They are completely trapped in acquisition and in collecting and in the external objects and the external people in their lives. There’s no freedom there. They can’t just let something go and adjust to the constant changing in their life. Renunciation is complete freedom.
It doesn’t matter what happens. Even major unwanted events happen in life, we know it. We’re all going to die. We’re all going to get sick. As I was taught when I was studying pathology in medical school, I remember the pathologist saying, If you live long enough you will all die of cancer.
So if something else doesn’t get us, cancer will definitely get us. So, you know, when the doctor calls us to the surgery and gives us a diagnosis, yeah, okay, we can accept it without renunciation means not being clinging to the importance of this life, ‘me, my family, my life, I’ve got all these responsibilities, this, this, this’ That’s unrealistic. It doesn’t mean that we don’t take on responsibilities and attempt to fulfil responsibilities. But when the time comes when we have to say good bye, let go. Let go.
And that’s the power of renunciation. So wonderful to be able to live in that way and to train our family, those dependent ones, to be able to live without attachment. This is true freedom. Alright. Others may well think that a person who is renounced craving for worldly pleasure is queer in their head because renunciation goes against everything that our society is geared to attain.
And as for becoming like a grand mother, this is what I’m saying to my niece, in the wisdom of experience most old people see the folly of childish pursuit of fantasies and so called fun. So, even you don’t have to meet the teachings of Buddha, you just have to live in this world long enough. You gain wisdom. And the older people are, usually they have great, they have great resources of the wisdom of experience of life. And there’s nothing, I think, so important as a grandmother, grandfather, somebody who the young ones can go to and get a bit of that wisdom.
So essential. See? Alright, let go. I mean, even young parents recognize when the children get caught up in their little fantasies and nothing like a child to live in a fantasy world. And the parents can go along and then they can ease the child out of the tears when their little bubble of fantasy bursts.
But even our adult life is a bubble of fantasy, too, from Buddha’s point of view. We’re all living in a make believe world and we need some wisdom to recognize just what we are fabricating in our life, what’s real and what’s not real. And there’s a lot of unreality in our adult behavior, in our adult beliefs, in our adult lifestyle. There’s a lot of unreality. We’ve got to recognize what it is and it’s subtle.
It’s not as obvious as a child’s game but it’s still very similar. When our bubble bursts, our adult bubble bursts, we can hurt even more than a child’s tears only last a short time. For adults, you know what it’s like. Alright. The concerns expressed by my friend who said those who stop having attachment desire etc.
Become like grandmothers. Those are the very voice of attachment itself. Attachment, well, is life is to be lived and enjoyed and get out there and get into it. Too accustomed to seeking and indulging in comfort, the very thought of renunciation is difficult for our mind to entertain. To take ordination as a monk or nun is a stand against attachment.
It’s a declaration of war against all disturbing emotions, especially attachment. And people wearing robes, that’s not an indication that they’ve renounced the world. That’s an indication that they’ve begun the battle to try and renounce the world. It’s like when I was a young monk a long time ago, I had only been a monk for a few months and I was at our retreat center in Dharmasala in Northern India in the Himalayas. And my teacher, Lama Thubten Yeshe, was staying at the center and I was there and he was talking to one of his older Western students and I just happened to walk past by and Lama Yeshe grabbed me and introduced me to this westerner who I hadn’t met before.
And I had just come out of retreat, out of a three month retreat. And that very day I had gone down to the town with a German monk, Dieter, and he took me to his favorite little restaurant which had a back veranda which nobody knew about. And this the couple who ran the shop, they made their own lemonade. So Dieter and I sat on this back veranda with a fabulous view going down the foothills of the Himalayas right south towards India and the snow capped mountains at the back and this lovely lemonade. And just coming out of retreat, was sort of intensely aware of my reaction, wow, this is a pleasure.
Anyway,