Attachment disillusions you

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.”

Simone Weil

            Today we really need to rethink the extent to which we are attached to things. Let me first make it clear that I am not referring to attachments in the sense of those emotional bonds we have with others. I am specifically referring to those that we have towards possessions.

Someone once said that attachment is like a fly getting stuck in a spider’s web, finding it very difficult to separate itself from that web; it is even likened to ants stuck in honey. Attachment is, therefore, the mind (fly/ant) stuck to an object (web/honey). The western world does not attach as much loathing to attachment as some eastern philosophies/religions do.

In the sacred Hindu poem called the Bhagavad Gita, we find several references to the act of shedding attachment; it says that when you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the self. The Bhagavad Gita goes on and says that knowledge is indeed better than mechanical practice, meditation is better than knowledge but better than all of these are to surrender attachment. The absence of attachment to things is also a major theme in Buddhism. I want to remind the reader to continuously question his/her tendency to become too attached to things which don’t have life-value.

Why is it that we so easily become emotionally devoted
to things that don’t LAST?
“shed your attachments” is a point well noted, 

so act on this blast from the past.