To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Sunday, September 22, 2019
 
In the olden days the enlightened ones figured out that the source of all suffering and pain was attachment. Attachment to worldly goods, to worldly relations, everything material in essence I would think. They gave up everything and went and sat in the mountains. Over the centuries there seems to have been a gradual but sure move back to the plains or the world of attachments so much so that now the holy mantra is to maximise attachments as much as possible be it goods or relationships. How did we go from one extreme to the other? From enlightenment to enrichment?

This idea of attachments bringing pain and detachment bringing peace never really resonated with me before. To me it seemed that, yes, attachments do bring pain—I can't deny that I am mad at my mother a lot of times—but they bring a lot of pleasure too. What else is there if one gives up on attachments? What did the rishis or sanyasis or sages really do on the top of the mountains?

Well, I think I am a bit more sympathetic to their worldview or position now after having gained life experience I guess. I feel that pursuing knowledge for its own sake gives me more pleasure than many relationships because these inevitably lead to disappointment and despair. There is a dynamic in attachments in the worldly sense where pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin; if you take one you take the other. But certain other pursuits though they don’t bring pleasure in the same way they bring peace or calm or contentment or internal harmony without the pain. I wonder if meditation does this but I have no experience of it so can't really comment.

In today's world of hyper consumption and hyper connections (fuelled by online media) there is an even greater urge and push to hoard things and people. This desire to amass more and more feeds on itself never quite achieving satiety eventually leading to disappointment and despair. Also, the more one is oriented to attachments in the external world the more one loses a grounding in the self…maybe why paradoxically the more we accumulate, the less we seem to attain at least in terms of net happiness.

I wonder though if it's possible to nurture detachment in the thick of worldly living ...to find one's internal mountain so to speak from whose peak we are not lured by the prospect of attachment to persons or things? Quite doubtful that the wise sages of yesteryears missed a trick or two…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 3:21 am 0 comments
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