As long as we are attached or averse to something we remain an ordinary person. Extra ordinariness comes with non-attachment, not before. Only who has transcended both attachment and aversion is extraordinary. So the question is,how can one attain to non-attachment? Before we go into non-attachment, let us understand the matter of attachment itself. How is it that one ceases to be non-attached and becomes attached to persons, things and ideas?
According to Krishna, non-attachment is embedded in the very nature of a human being, in our very being. Non-attachment is our basic nature, our original face. So the real question is how one deviates from his nature. We have only to know how we have gone astray from our nature. Non-attachment is our self-nature, we are born with it. So it is strange that in life, we all become victims of attachment and aversion. If attachment is nature, we cannot averse to anything. If aversion is our nature, we cannot fall prey to attachment. For example, when boil water it becomes hot, and when we cool it, it becomes cold, because water itself is neither hot nor cold. Water’s own nature transcends both hot and cold, so we can easily heat or cool it as we like. If renunciation was our self-nature, we could not cling to a thing, but we cling like leeches. It simply means that neither attachment nor aversion is intrinsic to our nature. Therefore we move in both directions- we now become attached and then averse to something. Because our innate nature transcends both these states of mind, we can move conveniently into them.
So the first thing to understand is that non-attachment is our self-nature, we are born with it. Secondly, we have to understand that it is only our self-nature that we attain to. Because, we can never attain to that which is alien to our self-nature; really we can achieve only that which we already are at some deeper level of our beings. A seed grows into a flower because it is already a flower in its depth. It is one of the fundamental laws of life that we can become only that which we already are at the center of our being. Therefore non-attachment is our self-nature- not attachment or aversion.
More analysis is to come in the coming weeks!
Dr. Dwarakanath, Director, MITRAN foundation- the stress management people
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