Buddha did not ask human beings to leave their households & go to an abandoned cave to meditate and achieve liberation. The Buddhist concept of attachment & non-attachment has been misconstrued. In order to give up attachment, you don’t need to shirk responsibilities; you don’t even have to stop enjoying the pleasures of life.
Attachment is more of a mental concept, contrary to the general notion of it being a physical concept. ‘Intention’ forms the spine of a strong spiritual life, doesn’t matter if you follow a particular religion or are an atheist. A thief in the mind is as much a thief as a thief in the body, the only difference is that the thief in the mind is unidentified, for his thoughts are covered by a cloak of inaction, possibly because he lacks the courage to give effect to his thieving intentions, while the thief in the body may be identifiable, for he has performed the deed.
Likewise, attachment stems from the mind. Attachment is a feeling of holding on, not letting go. The feeling of attachment is fraught with other feelings of jealousy, hatred, anxiety, anger and many other negative connotations. Together, they blend perfectly to unsettle your life.
Detachment implies that you become illusive, you start keeping to yourself all the time, under the misconstrued idealism that if you keep yourself away from human interaction, with a feeling that due to the lack of being around people or objects, you will rid yourself of attachment. However, that is not the case, when you begin your human interactions again, slowly, you will relapse to the old state of attachment and aversion, being judgmental. The reason is simple, you did not internalize the experience of letting go.
Non-attachment- This is the ideal state. You realize the cycle of pleasure and pain. Without becoming attached to the good experiences or objects, you savor the moment and at the same time when life throws your share of pain, instead of becoming averse to it, you embrace it and see it as an opportunity to take your spiritual practice to the next level.
While detachment has a negative connotation, for it causes you to become more rigid, non-attachment has none, in fact it makes you more fluid. Non-attachment simply means to be at ‘peace’ in the moment, to let go of the baggage of the past and the anxiety of the future. It is a state of indifference, you enjoy it as long as it lasts and move on once its run its course.
While we are attached, we tend to believe that happiness is without and not within. We seek to justify happiness by attaching too much emphasis on an object or situation, believing that it is the beauty of the object that is giving us happiness. Not realizing that the object is only made up of colors and lines and it is the mind which is deciphering and perceiving its beauty.
In other words, beauty is not an innate quality of the flower but it is rather the perception of the mind that is making it beautiful. Had the flower been inherently beautiful, then everybody would have thought a lily to be beautiful, but if you ask people, you will get mixed reviews, some will like it while others will not.
The flower has a short lifespan once it is uprooted. Now if you think of the flower as inherently beautiful & become attached to it, you will begin to assume that the flower forms the edifice of your happiness and that you will become depressed when the flower begins to wilt. Through this parallel I am sure you will see the futility of attachment.
“Empires are like human beings that begin to die the moment they are born- The crimson throne”-SudhirKakar- If everything is transient, then why be attached?
Theoretically, it may sound easy but internalizing the experience of non-attachment can be difficult. Nevertheless, it can be attained gradually.
This is how a Buddhist story on attachment goes-
Two monks were returning to the monastery in the evening. It had rained and there were puddles of water on the road sides. At one place a beautiful young woman was standing unable to walk across because of a puddle of water. The elder of the two monks went up to her, lifted her in his hands and left her on the other side of the road, and continued his way to the monastery.
In the evening the younger monk came to the elder monk and said, “Sir, as monks, we cannot touch a woman?”
The elder monk answered “yes, brother”.
Then the younger monk asks again, ” but then Sir, how is that you lifted that woman on the roadside?”
The elder monk smiled at him and told him “I left her on the other side of the road, but you are still carrying her”
In this story, the younger monk continued to have a fixation or attachment to the elder monk’s action and was therefore perturbed even though he had not done the forbidden deed himself whereas the elder monk, out of generosity had indulged in a forbidden deed, yet remained unperturbed, for he had moved on, not attaching himself to the act. This is the power of non-attachment, had he continued to think of the forbidden act he performed out of a fit of generosity, he would have felt miserable about his act.
Nothing can be achieved at one go, the process should be gradual, after all what you should be doing is internalizing the experience and not using it as a tool to portray yourself as a superior being, having a one-upmanship over other beings.
Becoming Non-attached-Internalizing the experience –
Since attachment is a mental concept, you can start by visualizing yourself as donating something that you don’t even need anymore, but you are clinging onto that object out of insecurity, in the hope that probably upon some future exigency, it might come in handy. In fact, if you are a believer in the law of attraction, by keeping it for some future exigency, you are summoning trouble for yourself.
To deepen the visualization, deepen the feeling of how the person’s face lit up with happiness when you gave it to him ,remember a moment when you received something you always wanted, feel the joy and blessings you received by extending a helping hand to that person. Isn’t sharing a wonderful feeling.
When the idea of giving starts coming more naturally to you, mentally begin dispensing items that are dear to you, this way your attachment to pleasurable objects will reduce. Realize that you enjoyed that particular item but like life, the moment is ripe for it to move on, for it to give pleasure to some other being.
Once you have reached this stage of internalizing, you may now physically begin donating. By way of actualizing the act of giving, you may begin to have short-lived experiences of non-attachment.
There is no particular timeline for the stages. You will know when to move to the next level. Whether it takes a day, a month, a year or even a decade to move from one stage to another don’t worry, keep moving forward,stay inspired.
Inspire others, not by intellectualizing but by internalizing, not by words but by deeds. As Martin Luther King Jr said- “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”
As they say “Happiness is a state of mind”, for it cannot be attributed to a particular external object. Become non-attached, look within for happiness,for it is not out there but within.
beingbuddha 