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the $100 chips at the craps table, even when it was play money and the denominations meant nothingthey were all equally worthless. I didn't want to lose my play money too quickly and be out of the game. I was trying to preserve my capital practicing good money management, just like a good investor. This attachment to the value of denominations on the chips, though, does not make me a good enough gambler to ever strike it big in Vegas. I can easily live with that. |
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When we think about our relationship to gain and loss in general, not just with money, is gain always positive? Is loss always negative? When we reflect on past experiences, is it ever true that what we thought at the time was a gain was actually a loss and that what we thought was loss turned out to be a gain? I certainly have had this shift in the way I evaluated the initial "loss" when later, I saw how losing something was actually necessary to open up the possibility for a future gain. |
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Craving, Clinging, and Attachment |
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Buddhists talk about the process of craving and clinging. Craving comes from our relationship to feeling; feeling is the condition for craving. Craving is also translated as "unquenchable thirst." Craving is the movement of desire to seek out and sustain the pleasurable contacts with sense objects and to avoid the unpleasant or to make them end. Craving may be to have something or become someone or something or the craving to make something end. |
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When we crave something, we lose our sense of authority, giving power to that which we crave. We have a restlessness of appetite and think there's never enough, that just one more thing is needed to satisfy uswhether it be one more mental state, one more experience, one more orgasm, or one more big trading gain. This becomes a basic hunger and can color our daily world so that no matter what we have, it feels like it's just never enough. |
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When craving becomes intense, it becomes clinging. The way it becomes strong enough to become clinging is when fixed positions are taken about how the world is. Clinging, or attachment to these positions, helps us define a sense of identity, of what we believe in and what matters to us. It also involves our holding onto our values of right and wrong and what we think about how the world is and how it should be. |
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While, from a psychological point of view, all of this is necessary as part of the normal development of individual personality |
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