In The World But Not Of It

According to the Buddha, the root of all suffering is attachment. This is actually the second of the Four Noble Truths. And it really does seem so. As an experiment, first imagine eating a barbecue and then throwing the barbecue stick into the garbage. No problem. Most of us wouldn't give a second thought about it.

Next, picture in your mind one of your more cherished possessions, be it a Rolex watch, your Android phone, or your parents' graduation gift to you, and imagine trying to throw it into a public garbage bin. If imagining it is too easy, then try to ACTUALLY throw it away. Assuming you do throw it, most of us would have required a supreme effort to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if you had an internal philosophical discussion about why it shouldn't be thrown away, how it would be such a waste and how much you can still make use of the item.

From the example above, we can see that the amount of pain we feel (physical, emotional or mental) is commensurate with the attachment we have to something, particularly when the prospect of losing that something is likely. However, don't start throwing away or giving away your wedding rings, your mother's jewelry or anything you deem as important. We have to take things into perspective.

We cannot avoid the fact that life is about attachment. We need it to a certain degree. If you felt no attachment to your studies, you wouldn't have had the motivation or desire to finish school. If you felt no attachment to your job, there would be no drive to excel and you probably couldn't care less if you were fired or became a bum for life. If you felt no attachment to your parents, you wouldn't care for them. For the spiritual aspirant, how then do we resolve the apparent contradiction in the Buddha's words?

I think it would help if we take a look at the works of Carlos Castaneda. For those who do not know about him, Carlos Castaneda was an American anthropologist of Peruvian descent. He achieved renown when he started writing a series of books describing his spiritual journeys in Mexico with the yaqui Indian Don Juan Matus. Don Juan called himself a sorcerer but is more accurately termed a nagual, an initiate and guardian of spiritual teachings that traces its lineage back to ancient Mexico.

In Castaneda's book A Separate Reality the following passages, as quoted from Don Juan, can be found:

A warrior (their term for an initiate) must know first that his acts are useless, and yet, he must proceed as if he didn't know it.That's a shaman's controlled folly.

Nothing being more important than anything else, a warrior chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn't; so when he fulfills his acts, he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn't, is in no way part of his concern.

A warrior may choose to remain totally impassive and never act, and behave as if being impassive really mattered to him; he would be rightfully true at that, too, because that would also be his controlled folly.

To understand the above quotes, we need to understand that the shamans of Mexico viewed the world differently from the average person. To them, everything was an infinite expanse of energy and what we see with our everyday eyes merely reflects how we perceive or interpret that said energy. They refer to this gate of perception as the assemblage point, but it's a long topic so its discussion has to be reserved for another article.

In any case, the point is that one must act as if a particular task matters, but keep in mind that in terms of the big picture it doesn't matter at all. Not even one nickel can be brought over to the other side after you die. So you can do everything you can to excel in your work, but not to the point that work becomes your life and you forget everything else. At the end of the day you should be able to leave it all behind and focus on other aspects of your life. So you should be able to live a full life without getting ensnared by temporal pursuits.

In one of my articles about How Thoughts Can Entangle, I explained how thinking about something creates energy cords from our energy body to the object of our thoughts. Things that don't receive our full attention can have their energetic cords easily severed, while those that we think more about and have desire for have thicker energy cords and are therefore harder to cut (please refer to the example at the start of this article).

The key is one's ability to detach oneself, and this is where all the different spiritual traditions and practices come in. In the course of one's development along the spiritual path, the goal is to acquire, if not master, the ability to attach and detach at will. This is controlled folly in the sense that you participate in the "folly" of temporal matters but can withdraw from them as necessary.

Notice how the spiritual traditions talk about the spiritual cords that connect us to our Higher Soul. When the Higher Soul withdraws these cords, the moment called physical death occurs. The more we are attached to temporal things and pursuits, the more energy cords we have. Since these are not physical specimens, the death of the physical body does not remove these cords. This makes it harder for the Higher Soul to pull the incarnated soul "up" and so a process of purification is needed to get rid of this "dead weight" and this is what we know of as Purgatory, meaning, to purge.

So looking again at the Buddha's words, we can say it in another way: the root of all suffering is the inability to detach. Now the meaning becomes clearer and more practical for everyday living. You may enjoy what life has to offer, and marvel at its wonders. We all should. But know it for what it is, a blink in the eye of eternity.

Be in the world, but not of it. Control your "folly."