Quotes About Attachment

By dwelling mentally on the situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on.

You don't seek permanency where it cannot be found: in the world of form, of gain and loss, birth and death. You don't demand that situations, conditions, places, or people should make you happy, and then suffer when they don't live up to your expectations. Everything is honored, but nothing matters. Forms are born and die, yet you are aware of the eternal underneath the forms. You know that "nothing real can be threatened."3

Once the ego has found an identity, it does not want to let go. Amazingly but not infrequently, the ego in search of a stronger identity can and does create illnesses in order to strengthen itself through them.

The more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself.

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. It is always concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it - who are you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there.

As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.

I try to find myself in things but never quite make it and end up losing myself in them. That is the fate of the ego.

The Buddha says that pain or suffering arises through desire or craving and that to be free of pain we need to cut the bonds of desire.-Eckhart Tolle

If you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness?

She said she was ready to listen. I asked: "Do you realize that you will have to let go of the ring at some point, perhaps quite soon? How much more time do you need before you will be ready to let go of it? Will you become less when you let go of it? Has who you are become diminished by the loss?" There were a few minutes of silence after the last question.

When I obtain this or am free of that — then I will be okay." This is the unconscious mind-set that creates the illusion of salvation in the future.

As long as a condition is judged as "good" by your mind, whether it be a relationship, a possession, a social role, a place, or your physical body, the mind attaches itself to it and identifies with it. It makes you happy, makes you feel good about yourself, and it may become part of who you are or think you are.

If your "love" has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets.

Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it's the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to a thought that has 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine' in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges.

In the proximity of death, the whole concept of ownership stands revealed as ultimately meaningless.

the root of suffering is to be found in our constant wanting and craving.

Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.

you are. Even if people agree with it, it is ultimately a fiction. Many people don't realize until they are on their deathbed and everything external falls away that no thing ever had anything to do with who they

When a condition or situation that the mind has attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body.

Wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting.

Ego is the complete identification with form. Physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms.

F]or so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self.

Whatever you identify with turns into ego.

The affluent world is even more deeply identified with form, more lost in content, more trapped in ego.