Yesterday’s thread on attachment/detachment/non-attachment left me DISSATISFIED.

A THREAD.

@lisatomic5 @harveykrishna_ @michaelcurzi @made_in_cosmos @forshaper

Attachment and non-attachment can refer to things we like and don’t like. Attachment is clearly a cause of suffering, but I am not convinced that means we should get rid of it.

Love is a fundamental form of attachment. It causes immense suffering (such as on the death of the loved one).

The example of parent-child love is one of the most compelling. Most parents would descend into hell for their children. The death of a child is one of the most intense forms of suffering one can experience.

For those saying this isn’t really attachment or suffering: it is. There is a reason for monastic celibacy, and this is a major one. Buddha abandoned his family. The word for his son was Rahula – meaning “fetter.”

Similarly - “compassion” means “to suffer with.” If you cultivate compassion you are going to suffer more, not less. It is difficult to see how compassion is not an attachment to other beings through their suffering.

“Attachment,” if defined in any kind of consistent way, including the way it has been used by Buddhists, includes things that we tend to think of as normatively good and an important part of being human.

What are some situations and contexts where detachment is good and attachment is bad?

Obviously, any kind of self-destructive, compulsive behavior is bad attachment: addiction, compulsive gambling, and the pursuit of goals that bring no joy. We can also want the wrong things – and be so obsessed with pursuing them that our lives pass us by.

Detachment as “getting out of your own way” can refer to a kind of cool levelheadedness, not being unbalanced by your own emotions. It is said that sociopaths make excellent surgeons.

There is also an advantage to mindfully concentrating on action and not outcome. Consider who has more success in seduction – the one who is thirsty, or the gad about town who delights in dancing and flirtation?

Attachment to legible goals can make us uncreative and blind to opportunity. To have good ideas requires lazy, playful free time. Detachment from goals and productivity is important for liberating this time.

Beyond these, there is a more fundamental form – and this is the deeper sense of detachment that is the aim of spiritual practice. I haven’t seen it explained well, and I think this causes confusion. It is the detachment that flows from an unconditional affirmation of life.

This is a recognition that the goodness of existence is not contingent on ordinary joys or pains but is in fact fundamental to existence itself. This knowledge is not something you deduce by reason – it is a perspective shift, like suddenly seeing the faces instead of the lamp.

Once you have attained this knowledge, you *do* still have preferences, sometimes very deep ones, and do experience pain and joy when they are denied or fulfilled.
But you’re no longer relying on their fulfillment to justify existence. You can rejoice even in pain.

If you are trying to justify your existence – through good works, by getting in the history books, by saving the world, by pursuing pleasure – you are in some sense a miser. The unconditional affirmation frees us from this grasping.

You do not have to flee from life but can engage in it more fully. You can begin to develop a radical generosity of spirit.

The saints who forgave their persecutors as they went to gruesome deaths were not engaging in cope – they were testifying to this foundational goodness, and they were doing it in part by demonstrating this generosity of spirit.

This sense that all of our struggles are underwritten by grace, and that everything is fundamentally alright, even when it isn’t – is the proper detachment, not based on a negation but an affirmation that leaves expansive room for love, pain, horror, duty and compassion. FIN