Attachments and Illusions
“Attachment is the great
fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is
detached.” Simone Weil
An attachment is no more than a safety blanket to
overcome human fear—the fear of any change and the fear of the unknown from
that change. To cope with that projected fear, you may just need many more
attachments.
An attachment is basically your own emotional dependence
on things and people that define your identity, around which you wrap your so
called “happiness” and even your survival. Attachments are your holding on to
anything and everything that you are unwilling to let go of, whether it is
something positive or even negative. Attachments do not make you live longer.
We are living in a world with many problems that confront
us in our everyday life and living, and many of these problems are not only
unavoidable but also insurmountable. To overcome these daily challenges, many
of us just turn to our own attachments as a means of distracting ourselves from
facing our own problems head on, or from adapting and changing ourselves in an
ever-changing environment. All of our struggles in life, from anxiety to
frustration, from anger to sadness, from grief to worry—they all stem from the
same source: our attachment to how we want things to be, rather than
relaxing into accepting and embracing whatever that might happen after we have
put forth our own best effort.
Attachments often become the sources of human miseries
and sufferings. Worse, they may also come in many different forms that we are
unaware of because of the illusions they have created in our minds.
Career attachments
Your career may span over several decades, involving many
ups and downs, such as promotion and unemployment, changes of career and
pursuits of higher qualifications, and among many others. They may all have
become your problematic attachments.
Money and wealth attachments
Money plays a major role in life. You need money for
almost anything and everything in life. In the past, people could enjoy some of
the blessings of life without spending too much real money. Nowadays, to
many people, enjoyment of life requires money—and lots of it—and you may
be one of them. Attachment to money and the riches of the material world is
often a result of an inflated ego-self. You may want to keep up with the
Joneses—driving a more expensive car than the ones of your neighbors and
friends.
Relationship attachments
Living has much to do with people, involving
agreements and disagreements, often resulting in having mixed emotional
feelings of joy and sorrow, contentment and regret, and among many others; they
often become attachments to the ego-self as memories that you may refuse to let
go of—not forgetting and not forgiving, for example, are some of the emotional
hurdles that are often difficult for many to overcome.
Success and failure attachments
Success in life often becomes an attachment in the form
of expectations that it will continue indefinitely, bringing more success.
Failure, on the other hand, may generate regret, frustration, and disappointment.
These emotional attachments are often difficult to let go of.
Adversity and prosperity attachments
In the course of human life, loss and bereavement are as
inevitable as death. Loss can be physical, material, and even spiritual, such
as loss of hope and purpose. You may also want to attach to your good old days,
and even refuse to let go of your current adversity. Both adversity and
prosperity attachments stem from the ego-self.
Time attachments
Time is a leveler of mankind: we all have only 24 hours a
day, no more and no less, although the lifespan of each individual varies.
Attachment to time is the reluctance to let go of time passing away, as well as
the vain attempt to fully utilize and maximize every moment of time. This
attachment often leads to the development of a compulsive mind and the action
of over-doing.
The bottom line: sometimes we are so wrapped up in the
outside world that we seldom have an opportunity to look inside of ourselves.
Understanding who we really are may make us happy, instead of creating our own
attachments in the material world we are living in. Imagine you are all alone
in a room with nothing, except a pen
and a piece of paper. Well, surprisingly, you may then become creative and even
happy, with nothing there to
worry about, and nothing there to distract your mind.
Identity crisis
According to Tim
Hiller, a motivational speaker, a football coach, and a writer, “We usually
don't realize the thing that is defining our identity until that thing is taken
away.”
Without attachments, we may have an identity crisis; but
the truth of the matter is that attachments only give us a false identity, and this may, ironically enough, lead to an
identity crisis.
The spiritual wisdom is that Jesus Christ did not
have an identity crisis: He clearly knew who He was; He never claimed to be
someone else that He was not; He knew where He originated from, and also where
He would be going. The problem with humans is that we do not know who we really
are; through comparison and contrast, the human ego is forever striving to be
someone else. Sadly, in the process, a real
identity crisis ensues.
Attachment illusions
All
human attachments are the raw materials with which we both consciously and
subconsciously create our own identities through a period of confusion and
uncertainty that may eventually lead to not only the identity crisis but also
the attachment illusions that distort our perceptions of the realities of life.
Without human attachments, there will be no identity crisis, and no illusion of
the mind.
For
example, does the attachment to money bring happiness, or make you live longer?
To
many, it does, especially if they have been experiencing the lack of it! That
explains why thousands of people line up for hours to get their lottery
tickets, hoping against hope that their tickets would win them great fortunes,
and hence their happiness. But the reality is that many lottery winners claim
that their happiness from the winning is only transient and is not lasting.
Bruce
Lipton,
author and cellular biologist, once said: “The function of the mind is to
create coherence between our own beliefs and the reality that we experience. We
generally perceive that we are running our lives with our own wishes and our own
desires. But neuroscience
reveals a startling fact: we only run our lives with our creative, conscious
mind about 5 percent of the time; 95 percent of the time, our life is
controlled by the beliefs and habits that are previously programmed in the
subconscious mind.”
It is your pre-programmed subconscious mind that tells you
money can give you happiness. That can also explain why you may find yourself
working in jobs that you do not even like due to your subconscious belief that
money is anything and everything in your life.
The whole world out there that you see in front of you right
now is nothing more than a projection of what you feel deep inside. Not only is
it a projection of your deep feelings but also you internal energy. Yes, money
is energy too, just like you, me,
anything and everything else. Money is an expression of energy of your
subconscious mind, building a complex system of money beliefs, such as “money
makes the world go round” and “when I have enough money . . . then I’ll be
happy, and can do whatever I want to do.”
But according to Harvard Business Review, money and happiness are not positively
correlated, because money may make people less generous and more
demanding and domineering. In addition, money may not bring out the best of an
individual: the more money that individual has, the more focused on self that
individual may become, and the less sensitive to the needs of people around, as
well as the more likely to do the wrong things due to the feeling of right and entitlement.
The bottom line: any attachment to a just about anything we
crave or value only creates an illusion in the mind.
Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
Mental attention is
the capability of staying focused. In a way, many of us are suffering from
attention deficit syndrome: our minds cannot stay focused; it is forever
shifting back and forth between the past and the future. 
