A reply of Tristan’s reminded me of something I’ve been wondering about lately, but it’s a different enough question I thought I’d start a new thread. The reply, on attachment, is here: Amrita question - #48 by Christi
The question this raises for me is what feels like a contradiction between love and non-attachment. I understand that “divine love” of the sort cultivated by yoga practices is loving everything for no reason. I feel like that quality has increased in me to a degree over the decades of AYP practice. Besides close friends and family, I feel sometimes a kind of love toward many other people and things, sometimes seemingly without much reason. I also feel less “attached” in the sense that I have a degree of witnessing/inner silence that makes me somewhat less easily bothered by external events, though certainly not completely impervious to negative feelings related to significant challenges, tragedies, etc.
I guess this is probably one of those many divine paradoxes: Yogani said something like “We will be ready to leave this world when we have learned to love it unconditionally.” There is also the phrase, “If you love something, let it go,” though I don’t know if that’s really the same (maybe that’s more about wanting what’s best for someone/something rather than what’s best for oneself).
At the same time, there are various religious sayings about how having more to lose in this life makes it harder to attain liberation: Jesus says it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I am not able to find it right now, but I recall a Buddhist saying something like “A wife and child are more dangerous than a hungry tiger.” The idea being that having a wife and child will attach you to this world in a way more dangerous to your spiritual growth than even being killed by a wild animal (and, indeed, the Buddha did leave his wife and child, though they eventually became disciples, I think).
The famous boxing coach Cus D’Amato said, “I believe nature’s a lot smarter than anyone thinks. During the course of a man’s life he develops a lot of pleasures and people he cares about. Then nature takes them away one by one. It’s her way of preparing you for death.” This sounds quite right to me. It seems easier to be at peace with dying when e.g., one’s body is frail and weak and all one’s friends have predeceased you than e.g., in the prime of life.
In particular, I find becoming a father that my child is the only person I seemingly love even more than myself. I definitely think I would jump in front of a bullet to protect her. By the same token, the thought of her dying is the worst imaginable thought for me, probably even worse than dying myself. The love I feel for her is stronger than any other love I feel, and I am at the same time most attached to her in the sense that I could least bear to lose her.
Yogani did say that the love of a parent for a child is inherently somewhat divine. Maybe divine love and yoga means extending that kind of love to the whole world? But if I loved the whole world as much as my child, it would seem only exponentially more difficult not to be attached to it! Tristan has said before that, even as we come to love everyone, it is still natural that we will have a special relationship with family members. Since I’m not advanced enough to love everyone for no reason, perhaps I simply don’t understand what that is like.
The best way I can think to understand this seeming paradox is that, the more one loves everything in the world, including everything that happens, regardless of whether others would label those happenings “good” or “bad,” one does not feel attached to that world because one is already perfectly fulfilled and does not need anything from the world. Moreover, dying and leaving this world would just be one more “happening” in the world, so it would not make sense to judge that as “bad” if one truly loves the world as it is. (And if one truly drops the notion of “me,” and “mine,” I suppose it won’t make sense to worry about losing “my body” or even “my daughter”–but the special connection between us is part of what I love, so if that were seen to be illusory, would I love her less?)
That said, as I continue on my spiritual practice, I feel less “attached” in the sense that the witness seems more “unmovable” or less bothered by external affairs, I don’t feel like this makes it any easier to bear the idea of a terrible loss, such as that of a child. Maybe it would be in the sense it might leave less of a lasting emotional scar than if I had never practiced yoga, but at the same time the greater capacity to love seems to make the idea of loss even worse, and the more one has (let us say I had many children and were wealthy and in better health, etc… ) the more difficult it would feel to not be “attached” to this life (whereas I can definitely see feeling less “attached” in the way Cus D’Amato describes, but maybe that is more of the usual life cycle than the path to true, final liberation?). Thanks for any thoughts.
