Autumn 2024

 

Nobody ever asks how to rid oneself of attachment! 

People want to be rid of anger because anger is an unpleasant emotion and they don’t like it
- it makes them feel bad. 

They know it’s not good and so, they want to know how they can eradicate it from their lives. 

And this is fine, but it is not anger which keeps us clinging to the wheel - it’s attachment,
greed and desire. But nobody wants to get rid of these. Provided our greed is satisfied at
some point, we like it. 

We say, “oh, if I can’t love anything anymore, if I weren’t attached to anything, it would be so
dull. Life would be so boring; it would be so cold.” Honestly don’t we think like that?
Unattached? Yuck! 

But non-attachment doesn’t mean that one is cold or that life gets very boring and that we
don’t have any more pleasure. It doesn’t mean that. 

What it means is that this clinging aspect of life which we all have to an extent, and which we
think of as being helpful and our natural right, is where all our fear and grief oozes from. 

It is very deep but it looks very nice on the surface; it looks like it gives us happiness and
pleasure in the world. We do not understand how incredibly insidious it is.

- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo –