Attachments

ATTACHMENTS

[Abridged from Late Fr. Anthony de Mello’s book – ‘Call To Love’ and published with kind consent of the publishers – Gujrat Sahitya Prakash. ‘Tony’ (1931 – 87) was a universally acclaimed spiritual teacher of divine integrity and wholeness – and he wrote for true seekers of Truth cutting across boundaries of belief, cult and religion. We gratefully remember Fr. ‘Tony’ for his spiritual gifts to humanity. -- Editor]

I. ATTACHMENTS DRAIN US OF LIFE

It is said that love is blind. But is it? Actually nothing on earth is as clear-sighted as love. The thing that is blind is not love but attachment. An attachment is a state of clinging that comes from the false belief that something or someone is necessary for your happiness.

Do you have any attachment – people or things that you falsely believe you could not be happy without? Make a list of them right now before we go on to study how exactly they blind you.

Think of a politician who has convinced himself he will not be happy unless he gets political power. His quest for power coarsens his sensitivity to the rest of life. He barely has time for his family and friends. Suddenly all human beings are perceived and reacted to in terms of the support or threat that they are to his ambition. And those who can neither threaten nor support he does not even notice. If, in addition to his craving for power, he has an attachment to other things like sex or money, the poor man has become so selective in his perceptions that he could almost be said to be blind.

Everyone sees this, except the man himself. This is the condition that leads to the rejection of truth and beauty and goodness, because one has come to be blind to perceive them.

To be in the state called love you must be sensitive to the uniqueness and beauty of every single thing and person around you. For love excludes no one at all; it embraces the whole of life; it listens to the symphony as a whole, not to just one or the other of the musical instruments.

Stop for a while now to see how your attachments drain life’s symphony no less than the politician’s attachment to power and the businessman’s attachment to money have hardened them to the melody of life.

Or look at the matter in another way:

There is an enormous amount of information that is continuously flowing in from the world through the senses, the tissues of the organs of your body. Only a small part of this information reaches your conscious mind.

Who decides what will finally make its way to your conscious mind from all the material that is pouring in from the world? Three decisive filters: First your attachments, second your beliefs and third your fears.

I. Your attachments: You will inevitably look for what fosters or threatens them and turn a blind eye to the rest.

You won’t be interested in the rest any more than the avaricious businessman is interested in anything that does not involve the making of money.

II. Your beliefs: Just take a look at a fanatic who only notices what confirms his/her belief and blocks out whatever threatens it and you will understand what your beliefs are doing to you.

III. And then your fears:

If you knew you were to be executed in a week’s time it would wonderfully concentrate your mind to the exclusion of everything else. That is what fears do.

They irresistibly rivet your attention on to some things to the exclusion of others.

IV You falsely think:

A. that your fears protect you,

B. that your beliefs have made you what you are and

C. that your attachments make your life exciting and secure.

You fail to see that they are actually a screen between you and life’s symphony.

It is quite impossible, of course, to be fully conscious of every note in life’s symphony. But if your spirit becomes unclogged and your senses open, you will begin to perceive things as they really are and to interact with reality and you will be entranced by the harmonies of the universe. Then you will understand what God is, for you will at last know what love is.

Look at it this way: You see persons and things not as they are but as you are.

If you wish to see them as they are you must attend to your attachments and the fears that your attachments generate. Because when you look at life it is these attachments and fears that will decide what you will notice and what you block out. Whatever you notice then commands your attention. And since your looking has been selective you have an illusory version of the things and people around you. The more you live with this distorted version the more you become convinced that it is the only true picture of the world because your attachments and fears continue to process incoming data in a way that will reinforce your picture.

This is what gives origin to your beliefs: fixed, unchanging ways of looking at a reality which is not fixed and unchanging at all but in movement and change. So it is no longer the real world that you interact with and love but a world created by your head. It is only when you drop your beliefs, your fears and the attachments that breed them, that you will be freed from the insensitivity that makes you so deaf and blind to yourself and to the world.

II DROPPING ATTACHMNTS

Imagine you have a radio that no matter how you turn the knob picks up only one station. You have no control over the volume. At times the sound is barely audible, at others, it is so loud that it almost shatters your eardrums. Moreover it is impossible to turn it off; at times it will be slow; it will suddenly begin to blare away when you want to rest and sleep.

Who would put up with this kind of performance in a radio? And yet when your heart behaves in this kind of crazy fashion you not only put up with it but even call it normal and human.

Think of the numerous times you were tossed about by your emotions, that you have suffered the pangs of anger, depression, anxiety, when in every instance it was because your heart became set on getting something that you did not have, or on holding on to something that you had, or on avoiding something that you did not want.

To put it briefly, the moment you pick up an attachment, the functioning of this lovely apparatus called the human heart is destroyed.

If you want to repair your radio, you must study radio mechanics.

If you want to reform your heart, you must give serious, prolonged thought to four liberating truths. But first choose some attachment that troubles you, something that you are clinging to, or something that you dread, or something you are craving for, and keep this attachment in mind as you listen to these truths.

I. The first truth: You must choose between your attachment and happiness. You cannot have both. The moment you pick up an attachment, your heart is thrown out of kilter and your ability to lead a joyful carefree serene life is destroyed.

See how true this is when applied to the attachment that you have chosen.

II. The second truth: Where did your attachment come from? You were not born with it. It sprang from a lie that your society and your culture have told you, or a lie that you have told yourself, namely, that without this or the other, without this person or the other, you can’t be happy.

Just open your eyes and see how false this is. There are hundreds of persons who are perfectly happy without this thing or person or situation that you crave for and that you have convinced yourself you cannot live without. So make your choice: Do you want your attachment, or your freedom and happiness.

III. The third truth: If you wish to be fully alive you must develop a sense of perspective. Life is infinitely greater than this trifle your heart is attached to and which you have given the power to so upset you.

Trifle? Yes, because if you live long enough, a day will easily come when it will cease to matter. It will not even be remembered – your own experience will confirm this. Just as today you barely remember, are no longer the least bit affected by those tremendous trifles that so disturbed you in the past.

IV. And so the fourth truth brings you to the unavoidable conclusion, that no thing or person outside of you has the power to make you happy or unhappy. Whether you are aware of it or not it is you and only you, who decide to be happy or unhappy, whether you will cling to your attachment or not in any given situation.

As you ponder these truths, you may become aware that your heart is resisting them or argues against them and refuses to look at them. That is a sign that you have not yet suffered enough at the hand of your attachments to really want to do something about your spiritual radio. Or your heart may place no resistance to these truths; if that is so, rejoice. Repentance, the refashioning of the heart has begun and the kingdom of God – the gratefully carefree life of children – has come within your grasp at last and you are about to reach out and take possession of it.

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All World
Gayatri Pariwar

Mar - Apr 2005

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