This requires that we honestly examine our attachments. What are yours? Money, power, pleasure, prestige? Dig deeper: Just maybe, they are your opinions. The Buddha himself named this attachment and its terrible effects more than 2,400 years ago in the Aṭṭhakavagga Sutta, when he is believed to have said, “Those attached to perception and views roam the world offending people.” More recently, the Vietnamese Buddhist sage Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote in his book Being Peace, “Humankind suffers very much from attachment to views.”
As the election season heats up, many Americans are attached to their opinions—especially their political ones—as if they were their life’s savings; they obsess over their beliefs like lonely misers, and lash out angrily when they are threatened. This is the source of much suffering, for the politically obsessed and everyone else.
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How my heart sings 