Oct 02, 2011 08:21pm

The Tao of attachment

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Why fear attachment? Detachment and attachment, both are important.

They give us experience and knowledge and we grow and evolve. Our evolution is guided by different kinds of processes. We are learning, growing and progressing all the while.

When you are attached to something, what does it mean? Have you ever felt attachment with the sky, earth, the sun or moon, trees and plants? We feel attachment with material things, in relationships, both of which are of mental, vital and physical nature. Attachment means that you get connected with something because of its attraction. Your senses give you information which creates some attraction and with it some contact is established. You start feeling a harmonious pressure when the information given by your senses is reinforced with your contact with something and you get attached to that. It is a pressure of feelings.


The same pressure transforms into detachment sometimes, and then you start feeling different kinds of pressures. With pressures, our nature opens up. Our layers of ignorance break a little bit and then we become more aware, more conscious. So, you give different kinds of names to pressures.

When it is harmonious, you call it attachment. When it is not harmonious, you call it detachment. These are just names from the dictionary of ignorance.

When you get attached to your breath, you always want to listen to your breath, want to feel your breath... this attachment can give you enlightenment. Spend one full day paying attention to your breath. Your breath is your life. But we never get attached to our breathing. If you can use the power of attachment to get attached to your breath, like a yogi who only lives with his breath, you will never lose time, you will always be fully present. Then the possibilities are good.

All life is attachment. When your attachment with something becomes one hundred per cent, it immediately becomes detachment. It is a cycle. Then another cycle starts. Suppose you are very attached to chocolate...One day you will start eating chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then the one hundred per cent attachment will detach you. You will not even like to think about chocolate after that.

It is a process of life. Attachment, detachment, re-attachment... The idea of all these lessons is that we should not live with attachments and detachments but we should learn to live with consciousness. But instead of living with consciousness, we are living with sensory information and ignorance always plays these kinds of games with us.

Our senses, mind, body, emotions, mental, vital, and physical natures are like children. When you want to educate them, you put yourself into a kind of discipline to force your senses to follow this discipline. They refuse it, they don't want it, they revolt, and you slowly convince them with love, anger, anything. You train them, teach them, and educate them. This process is tapasya.

Suppose you want to eat chocolate but you want to avoid it. You try not to eat chocolate. The chocolate is there for one month, but you are making an effort not to eat it. That is tapasya. When you make any effort -- with certain intentions, with full clarity, full understanding -- to become stronger than the things that affect you, this process is called tapasya.



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