The Path to Nibbana

by David C Johnson

  CHAPTER THREE – Attachments

  One mistake that an awful lot of people make is they say, “Well, meditation is just for sitting. The rest of the time I don’t have anything else to do, so, I can let my mind act like it always does.” This is a mistake. We need to consider the idea that meditation is life and life is meditation. You want to realize that you have attachments in your daily life and just because you are not sitting doesn’t mean those attachments aren’t there. The whole point in doing the meditation is for personality development. It’s for letting go of old habitual suffering [bhava}, and in place of this, developing a mind that has equanimity in it.

  The more resistance your mind has in doing this, the more you need to do it, because the resistance is your mind showing you where your attachment is, and that is the cause of suffering. This meditation works better than anything that I know of for letting go of attachments, letting go and relaxing of old hard-hearted feelings [bhava], letting go of the way you think the world is supposed to be so you can start accepting the way the world actually is.

  Your mind might say, “Well, I don’t like that! I don’t like the way they said this or that.” Ask yourself now, “Who doesn’t like it? Who is judging and condemning? Who is making up a story? Who is caught by their attachment?” “Well, ‘I’ am!”

  It might be helpful here to give a definition of attachment. An attachment is anything we take personally, any thought, any feeling, any sensation! When we think these thoughts or feelings are “mine,” this is “me,” this is who “I” am, at that point, mind has become attached, and this causes craving to arise in your mind and body.

  Craving always manifests as a tension or tightness in both mind and body. Craving is the “I” like it, “I” don’t like it mind - which arises in everyone’s mind/body process. Attachment is another word for craving and is the start of all suffering. When we see that everything that arises is part of an impersonal process, then, we begin to understand what it is like to see things with a clear observant mind.

  Somebody might say something very innocently, and you hear it through your attachment, and it’s negative. This is why we have to learn how to become aware of what is happening all the time in our daily lives.

  When you get finished sitting in your meditation for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or for an hour and you start walking around, what does your mind do? It takes off just like it always does. It thinks about this. It thinks about that. This is just non-sense thoughts.

  Most of us think those thoughts and those feelings that arise are ours personally; that they are not just random things. But, in truth, if you feed any kind of a thought or feeling with your attention, you make it bigger and more intense. When you realize that you are causing your own suffering, you have to forgive yourself for doing that.

  This means saying, “I forgive myself for not understanding. I forgive myself completely.” Of course, your mind is going to take off again and say,”Aah! This is stupid! This is nothing. This isn’t real. This isn’t what is actually happening. ‘I’ don’t want to do this!”

  Every one of those thoughts is an attachment, isn’t it? Every one of those thoughts has craving in it, doesn’t it? Every one of those thoughts is causing you suffering, right?

  Because of this, you have to recognize that you are doing this to yourself and let go of those thoughts. That’s just nonsense stuff anyway. It doesn’t have anything to do with what you are doing and where you are right now. Once you know this, you forgive yourself for not understanding; for causing yourself pain; for causing other people pain. YOU REALLY FORGIVE.

  Take a look at when you are walking from here to there. What are you doing with your mind? “Ho Hum. Thinking about this, and, I gotta do that, and, I have to go talk to that person, and, I have to do this.” All of that’s non-sense!

  Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t plan what you need to do next. You can. But just do that planning one time as your primary topic in the present moment. After you make up your mind what the plan is, you don’t have to think about it anymore. Repeating it, rolling it around again; all of that is just part of your old habitual tendency (bhava in Pāli). It is your old conditioned thoughts and feelings, and taking them personally and causing yourself pain and suffering.

  CHAPTER FOUR – Daily Practice

  Including the exercise of forgiveness in your daily activity is by far the most important part of this meditation. You forgive yourself continually, for not understanding, for getting caught up in this or that, for taking things personally. How many times have you found yourself doing this? “Hey! I don’t like the way you said that.” Ask yourself. WHO doesn’t like what? “Well, you said something that was hurtful.” To WHOM?

  You need to stop and realize that you’re taking all this stuff personally and it’s not really personal. It’s just stuff that happens. Forgive it! Forgive it even when you’re walking along a road, and you happen to kick a rock, and it hurts. Forgive the pain for being there! Your job is to keep your mind forgiving all the time. That’s what Mindfulness of Forgiveness Meditation practice is all about. The technique is not just about when you are sitting. This is a life practice. This is an all-the-time practice.

  If you want to really begin to change, you have to be willing to go through the forgiveness sincerely, because it will help you change a lot. You have to have patience, and it helps to have a sense of humor about just how dumb mind can be. The more you smile and laugh the easier the meditation becomes.

  CHAPTER FIVE - Finding Balance

  Whenever you personally continue to think about this and that, to judge this and condemn that, you are constantly causing yourself suffering. You don’t need to do that. You want to argue with other people about your attachments? What’s the point? When you really start practicing forgiveness for yourself, or forgiveness for another person, your mind starts to get into balance, and your sense of humor begins to change. This is equanimity. Then you don’t take thoughts, feelings and sensations and all this other stuff personally.

  When you practice in this way, you are seeing life for what it is and allowing it to be there. It’s not worth going over it in your mind, and over it, and over it, and over it. It’s not worth it. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of effort. Every time you have a repeated thought, you are attached. You’re identifying with that thought, and you’re taking it personally, and that is again the cause of suffering. What you see here is the Second Noble Truth. You are witnessing how Craving, taking it personally is the cause of suffering. And you can’t blame anybody else for it. It’s yours. You are doing it all to yourself. “WELL, they said this!”

  So what?

  Others may have their opinion. That doesn’t mean ‘I’ have to listen to them. I don’t have to take it in personally and analyze whether it’s correct or not because it doesn’t matter. The more you forgive in your daily life and daily activities, the easier it is to forgive the big things that happened in the past.

  CHAPTER SIX – Persistence

  When you’re doing the Forgiveness Meditation while you’re sitting, you’re staying with one of the suggested statements. You stay with that one statement until you internally feel, “YES, I really do forgive myself for not understanding.” It’s important to work this through.

  To really forgive can take awhile. It’s not just some quick fix to do in one sitting, and then you come in and say , “OK, now I’m done!”, or you say, “I’ve already done that.” Doing that is not where you’re going to get real change. Nope. You still have your attachments there. You still have to continually forgive yourself for not understanding, forgive yourself for making a mistake. That is what not understanding is about. You have to forgive yourself for judging, for condemning, for analyzing, for thinking, for getting angry. Forgive everything, all of the time.

  When I started to do the forgiveness meditation, which, I did personally for myself for two years, because I wanted to make sure I really understood this meditation, I went thro
ugh major changes. There were major changes; major personality changes. If you want that for yourself, you have to have that kind of patience.

  This idea of, “Well, I’ve already forgiven this person or that person,” that simply isn’t it. A little later on you figure out that you’re talking about how YOU didn’t like this or that from them! Ah! Guess what? Who hasn’t finished their forgiveness meditation? YOU haven’t forgiven yourself, or that other person!

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Going Deeper

  When you start to go deeper in your meditation, staying with the forgiveness, and you do forgive yourself for making mistakes, there can come a time when somebody comes up into your mind that you need to forgive.

  When this happens, you realize that you did not ask them to come up. You do not stop and say, “Well, I need this person to come up.” They came up by themselves.

  As soon as that person comes up, you start forgiving them, for not understanding. It doesn’t matter what they did in the past. All of your thoughts, all of your opinions of what they did in the past just keep bringing up more suffering.

  These thoughts come up because of your attachment. “I didn’t like that! I didn’t want that to happen! They are a dirty no good so and so because they did that to me.” Can you guess where the attachment is? Guess where the idea comes from that I can blame somebody else for my own suffering? The only person you can blame for your suffering is yourself. Why? Because YOU are the one that took it personally. You’re the one who had an opinion about it. You’re the one that used your habitual tendencies over and over again to justify the idea that I’m right and you’re wrong. That’s how we cause our own suffering.

  The forgiveness meditation helps you let go of that opinion, that idea, that attachment, and feel some relief. Because some past person did or said something that caused anger, resentment, jealousy, pain or whatever the catch of the day was – it can have a real tendency for your mind to get caught up in thinking about that past event.

  This is called getting caught by the story. You need to use the 6R’s and then go back to your forgiveness statement. It doesn’t matter how many times the story arises, please use the 6R’s and then forgive again. The story’s emotion will fade away after you do this enough. This is where patience is needed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Letting Go

  When you see someone else come up in your mind, somebody you really had a rough time with, and you didn’t like it; someone you started hating for whatever reason, you forgive them. With your mind’s eye, you look them straight in their eye, and you tell them sincerely: “I forgive you for not understanding the situation, I forgive you for causing me pain, I forgive you completely.”

  Now, keep that person in your heart and radiate forgiveness to them. If your mind has a distraction and it pulls you away from that; you might hear in your mind, “No, I don’t, that no good so and so. I won’t forgive him!” Using the 6R’s, let go of this and come back and say, “I do forgive you.”

  It has to be sincere. “Well, I’m not going to forgive that dirty no good so and so.” Why not? “Because they caused ‘ME’ suffering!” Oops! WHO caused who suffering? YOU caused your own self suffering because you took it personally, and YOU reinforced that with a lot of thoughts and opinions and ideas about why that was wrong.

  In other words, you were caught in your craving, your own clinging, your habitual tendencies and that leads to more and more dissatisfaction, aversion, pain, and suffering.

  CHAPTER NINE – Relief

  It’s really important to realize that this is not an easy practice. It’s hard to forgive someone when they have really caused you harm. Take a woman that has been raped or a man who has been beaten and robbed. It’s hard to forgive the person who raped them or beat them because they have been violated. But, holding onto their hatred of that person is keeping them attached. It doesn’t matter what the action was. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past. What matters is what you are doing with what you have in your mind right now.

  To completely develop this practice to the highest level means that you keep forgiving and forgiving! Over and over. With your mind’s eye, you look them straight in the eye, and you say, “I really do forgive you.” And your mind says, “NO, I DON’T” And you let that go, and 6R, and come back. You say, “I really do forgive you.” Then you take that person and put them into your heart and continue to radiate forgiveness to them. How long do you do that? As long as it takes.

  For some attachments, one or two sittings is all you will need. Some other attachments might take a week; might take two weeks or even longer. Who knows? It doesn’t matter. If you need time, you can take time! You have all the time there is.

  You will feel a very, very strong sense of relief when you let go of the hatred you have towards these people. Then anytime you think of them, you kind of think of them with a mind that says, “Well, they made a mistake, they didn’t know what they were doing. It’s ok.”

  That’s how you let go of an attachment (craving). That’s how you let go of the pain of that past situation. This doesn’t mean that the person who was violated is going to go up and hug the person who did that to them. They would avoid them because they know there is a possibility of personal harm. But they don’t hate them anymore. They don’t think about it anymore. They have let it go.

  That’s what the forgiveness is all about. It’s about letting go. You are giving up old dissatisfaction and dislike. You are developing a mind that says, “Well that’s ok. You can be like that.” That is not taking it personally.

  CHAPTER TEN – Obstacles

  The biggest part of the Mindfulness of Forgiveness Meditation is learning how to let go of your personal opinions, ideas, concepts, stories. You might stay with a person for a long period of time because of your opinions and your attachment to this.

  Every time you are doing any walking or sitting meditation, keep forgiving them over and over again. Your mind might get bored with that and say, “OH, I don’t want to do this anymore!”

  Well that’s another kind of attachment, isn’t it? So, what do you do with that? You have to get through it by forgiving the boredom for being there. That’s ok. Your mind is tricky. It’s going to try to distract you anyway it can. It’ll bring up any kind of feelings and thoughts and ideas to distract you, because, it doesn’t like the idea of giving up attachments. Your mind really feels comfortable, holding onto attachments.

  We need to go easy on ourselves as we develop this practice. After all, how many years did it take us to build up our habits [bhava]? It takes patience to move in the opposite direction now and to change those unwholesome mind-states into new wholesome tendencies. Be kind to yourself and take your time.

  The whole point of the Meditation is LEARNING HOW TO CHANGE. Learning how to let go of those old non-sense ideas and thoughts and develop new ideas and thoughts that make you happy and make other people around you happy too. That’s the whole reason for the precepts. They outline an option for us to follow, so we gain balance in our life.

  Let’s take a quick look at the precepts. Do not kill any living beings on purpose. Don’t take what is not freely given to you (no stealing). Don’t engage in wrong sexual activity with another person’s mate or a person too young living with their parents. In short, don’t do anything that will cause mental or physical harm to any other human being. Don’t engage in telling lies, using harsh language, gossip, or slander. Lastly, don’t take recreational drugs or alcohol because these will weaken mind and the tendency to break the other precepts is stronger!

  These precepts are like an ultimate operational manual for life. If you keep them well, then you get the most out of your life, they make you, and others around you happy. The more you can continually follow them, the better your frame of mind will become. You will more easily forgive that other person, your mind will become softer towards that person, and you will feel more relief.

  What happens is, after you practice this way for a while, then you go
“Ah, I do, I really do forgive you!” and there’s no, energy behind it at all. It’s just like, “yeah, this happened; it’s in the past; it’s no big deal.” This is what forgiveness is all about.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN – Daily Life

  How can this practice affect your daily life? This is a good question. You’re more open, you’re more accepting. You’re not judging. You’re not condemning. You’re not dis-liking, because as you see that tightness of mind coming up in you, and you go, ”Oops! I forgive you for not understanding this one!”, and you smile. You let it go.

  One of the hardest things a guiding teacher has to do is to teach people that ‘Life is supposed to be fun.' It’s a game! Keep it light! If you, play with your mind and your attachments that means you are not being attached to them so much. As you play with them, you’re not taking them so seriously anymore. When you don’t take them seriously, they’re easier to let go of.

  That’s what the Buddha was teaching us! He was teaching us how to have an uplifted mind all of the time; how to be able to be light with your thoughts, with your feelings, and your ideas, and your past actions.

  Yes. It’s true. On some occasion, you made a mistake. Well? Ok! Welcome to the human race! I don’t know of anyone who hasn’t made a mistake and felt guilty about it. Sure they do.

  And what is that guilt? Non-forgiveness. That’s an example of your mind grabbing onto what’s happening and saying, “I really screwed up, and I need to punish myself for that.” That’s what your mind is saying. Now, do you see what you can do about this? Right! The more you become serious with your daily life, the more attachments you will have. The less equanimity, the less mental balance you will have in your life.