Upādāna

What is the definition of attachment?

Being dependent on someone or something: emotional, mental or physical.

We attach ourselves to things, to people, to places: it’s like we can't help but cling to anything and everything around us. But an attachment is an odd companion. It treats this something as though it is a part of your body; inseparable, despite the fact that it is not a part of yourself.

We become so hurt by losing it. What we don't realize is that possession is merely a comfortable illusion we create for ourselves because we want a thing to exist as if it were a part of us when it can physically never exist that way.

Only the idea of it can exist that way and ideas are as much a part of you as your tone of voice and the words you speak. They are a collection of the world around you, interpreted by your subconscious mind. You don't possess them, you are them. They as much possess you as you do them and ideas themselves are ethereal, inherently unable to be possessed, wandering through everything we think, see, and do.

Our minds are constantly outside, never fully existing in the present moment, always directed by the past, and dreaming or worrying of the future. Creating fantasies within the mind, and using those fantasies to interpret the external world. What is the present moment? Does it even exist?

Can we free ourselves from attachments? Can we free ourselves from our pasts and fantastic futures to find the present moment? Can we will something like that to happen?

Essentially will is our ability to cause things to happen. We will something and it occurs. But what is will?

Cause and effect. Will is the cause and the effect is whatever we will to happen. But we forget that will is not simply an ultimate cause; it too had causes to bring about the act of willing. In forgetting this, our understanding of will is not unlike a god's act of creation scenario along with its inherent paradox.

Our will is created by forces outside our conscious experience. The perspective of willing is merely that: it is an illusion. We are not the ultimate cause in our act of willing. If we understand this, then what do we become?

Well, what are we to begin with? How does a person define himself? Is he merely what he perceives as himself? Certainly not. We have already shown that will is merely an illusionary perspective of something more. So we too are something more than we think we are.

Are we then a collection of cells to form a body and a collection of experiences and understandings to form a mind? What is it that wills? Is it our cells? Is it reality bent into perspective by our minds? A thought is merely a perspective, an experience (and a very personal one). It is not you who does the thinking, you are merely experiencing a perspective on the thought; a thought being a collection of actions outside your comprehension.

We are not merely what we perceive to be ourselves. In fact what we perceive to be ourselves is but a small view of something much more, it is illusionary and masks the true nature of existence. We must therefore redefine our understanding of ourselves.

What then are we?




(thank you ML)