Attachment or clinging to what is conditioned and therefore unreal is more or less painful. It is like grabbing hold of a hot object and getting badly burned rather than just lightly touching it. The more we attach and cling to our body and the world it participates in the deeper we burn ourselves.
Should we consider detaching from our normal tendency to grab hold of our conditioned body, so as not to become so involved with its senses and basically all that comprises the manas (mental activity in its widest sense) — Yes! But how do we do this detaching? This is not an easy question to answer.
In was in the late 70s and I was carrying water in two buckets back from the spring house up to the ranch house. Before that, I had been doing a lot of meditation in the adit and walking several miles a day. As I was walking back to the ranch house, for about twenty feet, I was neither in my body nor out of it so as to look down upon it. In other words, I was not completely out of my body like an OBE nor completely in in my body the way I usually was. I was in the middle, so to speak, just enough to do any task I wanted to like carrying water.
What if our attachment to the body is really a kind of over-attachment and all that such a condition implies? What if normal were, actually, to be like I was during those twenty feet in a kind of equilibrium in which my body had lost, for a small moment of time, its seeming importance enough to make me stop over-attaching to it?
For many years I had pondered this experience then recently related it to attachment; of being overly attached and what that means. But to the question, how do we do this detaching so as to be less attached. I have no answer — not yet.
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