Hi dhammahollanda,
You asked:
"Our possessions and success end up owning us" Could you elaborate on this phrase?
I see in myself the truth of this as awareness ripens. Equally those material things we think we lack and our failures end up owning us too. Your reply to Dhamma pointed to this too:
Nothing is inherently ours. I agree. There's no such law of nature. As long as the broader network of society accepts individual property, property is something borrowed essentially and still a social construct rather then a truly hard fact.
The teachings of the Buddha point to a deeper truth that underlies this manifestation at the surface. The self is a social and individual construct. The human brain is in no small part a storytelling machine. "I am this", "I did x,y and z", "I own a Ferrari", "my people are ... blah, blah, blah", "those people are different because .. ".
Yet when you sit mindfully and examine the reality is there any "I" other than immediate experience of being and process? Not in my experience, not really. The ego is conditioned to attach/cling to some stories, to reject/hate others, and is ignorant of the process of body and mind behind these things. The ego is made of habits of attaching to some stories, including those about our possessions, successes, failures and wants. But it's not real: it's just a story we tell ourselves about "I, me and mine".
There is an evolutionary advantage to this storytelling part of what we are: our hunter-gatherer forebears were more likely to survive, breed and pass on their genes if they could remember the story of the plant uncle John ate that killed him, or the bit of jungle inhabited by ferocious tigers where the Bones family got eaten for lunch, and the one about where it was safe to drink water, and where the water was unsafe.
Modern society has hijacked this part of our mind and turned us into unconscious and unthinking consumers (and ego is happy to go along with this): consumers of material things and also of stories themselves. Our need for human company and the safety in numbers of the tribe has been hijacked to divide us. The ego becomes the guardian of these things and stories we identify with: it has been hijacked (and hijacks us) so we buy into the stories of what 'success' consists of; the things we need to fit in; the things 'those people' have that we do not, or the things that we have and which 'those people' do not.
It's all rather empty if one is able to examine the felt sense of these attachments and identifications. And that emptiness is really rather frightening in a world consumed with such a way of life: ego fights back strongly against the realisation of how untrue our stories are ... as those stories are the very thing ego is made of.
Ultimately we should come at a point where we're ready to renunciate fully. I'd suggest to be tolerant, pragmatic and kind with our imperfection renunciation and make small steps towards renunciation.
It seems to me that as one first starts following the teachings this pragmatism is wise. It can, however, become an excuse for not doing 'that which must be done', as the Buddha's teachings phrase it, and lead to 'backsliding' or running in circles, approaching the truth yet never making the leap into the unknown that the Dhamma calls for.
How do you approach this matter? How do you avoid suppression or are you OK with that?
I laugh at my own folly in falling for the tricks of ego just as much as anyone else. I'd go mad if I didn't. I heard the teachings long ago, I understood the teachings long ago ... I'd still quite enjoy that Ferrari ... at least for a few hours or days until the emptiness started to poke it's ugly head back into the scene 😂