Feeling ('vedana') as Cause for Craving and Attachment | Dhamma Talk by Ajahn Dhammasiha

A question is brought up about the difference between craving ('taṇhā'), clinging ('upādāna') and attachment. Ajahn Dhammasiha responds by directing our attention to the cause of craving, which is feeling ('vedanā').
If we want to understand a something, the Buddha's approach is to look for the it's cause. So in order to understand craving and clinging, we have to look at it's cause, namely feeling.
Feeling ('vedanā') is the pleasant or unpleasent quality inherent in all conscious experience. If we see or hear or smell or taste or touch or think anything, it will always feel either pleasent or unpleasant (or even painful, if very unpleasent). Feeling is usually what motivates us, the true reason why we do something, the motivation for our actions.
For instance, when we eat something, it's not normally so much about the food, but about the feeling we get when eating that food. If we shop, it's not necessarily about the objects we buy, but the feeling we get from them. Once we understand feeling, we are able to figure out why we're doing things, and why we can't stop doing things that are actually bad and harmful to us.
Once it feels good, we crave for at, attach to it, cling to it, and identify with it, and the delusion of self ('sakkāyadiṭṭhi'), 'entity view', arises. We take the feeling, the the object causing it, to be 'me', 'mine' and 'self'.
If we can let go of feeling, if we're equanimous without dislike to unpleasent feeling, without liking of pleasant feeling, then craving and attachment and identification will not arise, and we're free.
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