Attachment and Detachment

These two words have wonderfully ambiguous connotations. To be attached is to be drawn to something, but the attraction may very well arise precisely because the object bestows attention back. Attachment implies possession, therefore control. Love and attachment are often conflated, but troubles rapidly develop when love is not returned. Then attachment turns out to be simply trade: I give you attention if you attend to me. Failing this give and take, we’ll soon hear someone say, “X, I think we need to talk.” Love is much more difficult. If it is real, it’s anchored in the will; it’s not provisional, contingent, situational, etc. The reason why pet rocks are amusing objects is precisely because the rock cannot return affection. This aspect of attachment shows that it has a strong element of need hidden within it. Hence people can be said to be “too much attached to”—you fill in the blank.

Detachment gets its positive connotations because people are often excessively attached—so much so that other aspects of their lives suffer. Hence detachment is of value. If we’re in pain but able to detach our attention from the problem, we benefit. Detachment diminishes emotional involvement and therefore increases our freedom to reason, hence to discover objective values, thus to make correct decisions. But too much detachment is viewed as indifference, an absence of “love,” but read this as an absence of willingness to reciprocate attention with attention. Nothing infuriates the lover so much in a quarrel as the partner’s cold insistence on being rational.

If you attend to X with all your heart, you can’t attend to Y. If Y requires a lot of attention, X must be diminished so that Y can increase. In spiritual systems, therefore, teaching people techniques of detachment is usually job one. But this is best achieved by teaching people how to attach attention at will.

People are often frustrated by such systems—and exploited by cults—because they don’t understand the basics. They attach themselves to circles, groups, and communities—or avidly read “occult” literature—wanting to know “secrets.” They think that conceptual grasp of some secret will give them “powers.” This position is equivalent to wishing to be told what chocolate tastes like. No amount of reading, lectures, off-sites, seminars, and mystic journeys to India or Tibet will produce the desired result—until chocolate is actually available and put in the mouth.

Cults exploit people by paying them lots of attention and feeding them conceptual or emotional pabulum—when what is really required is the training of inner powers, already present, which, alas, only the seeker can actually do. The feedback from this is almost always next to nothing—for years on end. Extraordinary persistence is necessary before changes actually manifest. For the vast majority of seekers, long before this can even begin to happen, the work gets tiresome, they drift away, they settle down and find some satisfying game of give-and-take that will stimulate them until it’s time to go. It is for this reason that Sufis, for example, say that the minimum qualification for spiritual advancement is to become a “householder,” generically a person engaged in responsible social activity. The ability to persist in boring and tedious activities, undertaken just because they have to be, for the common good, not for self-pleasing, is “good practice,” as it were, for doing the same thing on another plane.

What appears to many as airy-fairy, whispy-ghostly, magic-wandish, fancy-dress, mystical-elvish activity—surrounded by an aura of mystery, romance, and miraculous powers—is really something much more akin to training for a marathon or editing a ridiculously sloppy computer-generated index of 40,000 words down to 12,500. You really need a lot of attachment and detachment to do jobs like that. And after you’re done, the big feedback is that you’re finally done. Way in the distance will come a payoff. Way in the distance.