When it comes to words, their meaning can often be subtle and confusing. As you all know from your work, a word can mean one thing to one person and something else to another. A word designates an idea, and you all know that each true idea can be distorted into an untruth by taking it to an extreme that must be wrong. This distortion usually happens quite deliberately, although unconsciously. One seeks to find justification for the problem in one's soul by going to the extreme of a right idea. This has been the trouble with all great religious teachings throughout the ages. Detachment undergoes a similar fate. People who are afraid of life and love often escape into the distorted idea of detachment. But this should not make you forget the real meaning, the right sense of it.
The true sense of detachment is to be detached from one's own ego-centeredness. Thereby the person obtains a certain objectivity, which is detachment. It means that you consider your own hurt vanities, advantages, goals no differently from those of other people. You know how difficult this is to attain, even to a small degree. It cannot be attained by escaping life and its hurts, as some people want to believe, by misinterpreting spiritual ideas. Quite the contrary. Only by facing life's hurts in the right spirit, by not being so involved with your self that you see nothing else, will you come to the point of healthy detachment and objectivity. Being human, it is understandable that you fear life and love, but you cannot force fear away through the wrong kind of practice of detachment. You can reach true detachment only by degrees. At one extreme is the person who plunges headlong into every negative situation. Various psychological factors may be responsible for it -- self-punishment or a form of aggressiveness toward others, punishing them by one's own unhappiness -- and many other factors. These are the people who always become involved in a negative and destructive way. At the other extreme is separateness, the attitude that makes one believe one can go through life avoiding its negative aspects. If you are so much afraid of hurts that you force strict measures on yourself to avoid them, you can never rise above them, and therefore you can never attain the right kind of detachment. In order to rise above anything, you have to go through it, so that you lose the fear of it. This has to be done in the right spirit -- neither in a masochistic, self-destroying attitude, nor in an attitude of fear and a sick kind of self-love. So the right middle way has to be found in this respect as well as in all others. This is always the difficulty. The right middle way is, briefly speaking, that life brings all sorts of experiences; that it can only bring you experiences your own soul calls forth; that you do not avoid happiness because you are afraid of unhappiness; that you do not avoid positive involvement because you are afraid of negative involvement. All negative experiences should make you stronger. If they weaken you, it is not the negative experience that is the cause of your weakening, but your attitude to the experience. This does not exclude a certain caution. It does not mean to rush into things without thinking through; without using one's intuition; without trying to really and truly see the situation, the other person, and everything that is part of the issue. Many times seeing is avoided because one wishes to have the other person fit to one's own need; or one wishes the situation to do so, and therefore one does not dare to look. This right middle way demands a certain objectivity. But do not forget, you can only become objective about the world and the situation around you to the degree that you succeed in being truly objective about yourself.
Detachment is achieved only after one has accepted all that life has to offer, including death. Some people believe they have risen to genuine acceptance, when in reality they simply reject pain and suffering, and therefore also pleasure and joy. Such persons will find at some juncture in their evolution, be it in this life or later, that they have to come back to the point at which they fled from their soul-experience, so that the experience they have avoided can be learned by fully going through it.
The withdrawn type and the seeker for power seem to have something in common: aloofness from their emotions, non-attachment to others, and a strong urge for independence. However much the underlying emotional motivations may be similar -- fear of getting hurt and disappointed, fear of being dependent on others and therefore feeling insecure -- the dictates of the idealized self- image of these two types are very different. While the seeker for power glories in hostility and in an aggressive fighting spirit, the withdrawn type is entirely unaware of such feelings, and whenever they come to the fore is shocked by them because they violate the dictates of the withdrawal solution. These dictates are, "You must look benignly and detachedly at all human beings, knowing their weaknesses and good qualities, but without being bothered or affected by either." This, if true, would indeed be serenity. But no human being is ever quite as serene. Hence such dictates are unrealistic and unrealizable. They, too, include pride and hypocrisy: pride, because this detachment seems so godlike in its justice and objectivity. In reality one's view may be just as colored by what another thinks, as is the case with the submissive type. But being too proud to admit that an exalted one can be touched by human weaknesses, such a person tries to rise above all that. This is not possible. Since this type, too, is as much dependent on others as the other two types, the dishonesty is just the same. And since the detachment is not true and cannot ever be true if it is used as a pseudo-solution, such a person must also fall short of the standards and dictates of this particular idealized self-image. This will make him or her just as self-contemptuous, guilty, and frustrated as are the other two types when they fall short of their respective standards. Serenity in the healthy way will not cause you to hide from emotions, experience, life, and your own conflicts; love and power in their healthy forms will give you a healthy detachment when looking at yourself so that you will truly become more objective. True serenity is not avoiding experience and emotions which may be painful at the moment but might yield an important key when the courage is there to go through them and find what is behind them.
It is very possible not to experience any longing for pleasure, fulfillment, happiness. In fact, you may be completely resigned to a life of serene detachment, while underneath craving and dissatisfaction do a great deal of damage. The superimposed denial of the longing for pleasure supreme may seem to be expedient because the psyche may feel endangered if it were to give vent to it. In such cases the perverted instinct of self-preservation is stronger. But that does not mean that, stifled as it may be, it does not do equal damage.
t seems paradoxical to postulate that both involvement and detachment must exist in the healthy psyche. Again there must be a twofold approach to the understanding of this seeming contradiction. If detachment is indifference because you are afraid to be involved and unwilling to risk pain and scared of loving, then detachment is a distortion of the real attitude. If involvement means merely an expression of a super-tense will that your infantile insistence on having what you want right away generates, then the healthy, productive version of involvement is inverted.
BA ECONOMICS (University of Cambridge, England); Ph.D. LINGUSTICS (University of Cambridge, England); NLP (Los Ángeles, USA); DOCTORADO=Ph.D. FILOLOGÍA HISPÁNICA (Universidad Complutense de Madrid - Madrid, ESPAÑA); SPIRITUAL LIFE COACH=Coach Personal Espiritual - (Escuela de Inteligencia - Madrid, España)
MASATER en INTELIGENCIA EMOCIONAL - Universidad de Camilo José Cela, Madrid, ESPAÑA
5 comments:
When it comes to words, their meaning can often be subtle and
confusing. As you all know from your work, a word can mean one thing to one person and
something else to another. A word designates an idea, and you all know that each true idea can be
distorted into an untruth by taking it to an extreme that must be wrong. This distortion usually
happens quite deliberately, although unconsciously. One seeks to find justification for the problem
in one's soul by going to the extreme of a right idea. This has been the trouble with all great
religious teachings throughout the ages. Detachment undergoes a similar fate. People who are
afraid of life and love often escape into the distorted idea of detachment. But this should not make
you forget the real meaning, the right sense of it.
The true sense of detachment is to be detached from one's own ego-centeredness. Thereby
the person obtains a certain objectivity, which is detachment. It means that you consider your own
hurt vanities, advantages, goals no differently from those of other people. You know how difficult
this is to attain, even to a small degree. It cannot be attained by escaping life and its hurts, as some
people want to believe, by misinterpreting spiritual ideas. Quite the contrary. Only by facing life's
hurts in the right spirit, by not being so involved with your self that you see nothing else, will you
come to the point of healthy detachment and objectivity. Being human, it is understandable that
you fear life and love, but you cannot force fear away through the wrong kind of practice of
detachment. You can reach true detachment only by degrees.
At one extreme is the person who plunges headlong into every negative situation. Various
psychological factors may be responsible for it -- self-punishment or a form of aggressiveness
toward others, punishing them by one's own unhappiness -- and many other factors. These are the
people who always become involved in a negative and destructive way. At the other extreme is
separateness, the attitude that makes one believe one can go through life avoiding its negative
aspects. If you are so much afraid of hurts that you force strict measures on yourself to avoid them,
you can never rise above them, and therefore you can never attain the right kind of detachment. In
order to rise above anything, you have to go through it, so that you lose the fear of it. This has to be
done in the right spirit -- neither in a masochistic, self-destroying attitude, nor in an attitude of fear
and a sick kind of self-love. So the right middle way has to be found in this respect as well as in all
others. This is always the difficulty. The right middle way is, briefly speaking, that life brings all
sorts of experiences; that it can only bring you experiences your own soul calls forth; that you do not
avoid happiness because you are afraid of unhappiness; that you do not avoid positive involvement
because you are afraid of negative involvement.
All negative experiences should make you stronger. If they weaken you, it is not the negative
experience that is the cause of your weakening, but your attitude to the experience. This does not
exclude a certain caution. It does not mean to rush into things without thinking through; without
using one's intuition; without trying to really and truly see the situation, the other person, and
everything that is part of the issue. Many times seeing is avoided because one wishes to have the
other person fit to one's own need; or one wishes the situation to do so, and therefore one does not
dare to look. This right middle way demands a certain objectivity. But do not forget, you can only
become objective about the world and the situation around you to the degree that you succeed in
being truly objective about yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azRXD_VLTzU&NR=1
Amazing hug,
Rosa
Source: Pathwork
Detachment is achieved only after one has accepted all that life has to
offer, including death. Some people believe they have risen to genuine acceptance, when in reality
they simply reject pain and suffering, and therefore also pleasure and joy. Such persons will find at
some juncture in their evolution, be it in this life or later, that they have to come back to the point at
which they fled from their soul-experience, so that the experience they have avoided can be learned
by fully going through it.
The withdrawn type and the seeker for power seem to have something in common: aloofness
from their emotions, non-attachment to others, and a strong urge for independence. However
much the underlying emotional motivations may be similar -- fear of getting hurt and disappointed,
fear of being dependent on others and therefore feeling insecure -- the dictates of the idealized self-
image of these two types are very different. While the seeker for power glories in hostility and in an
aggressive fighting spirit, the withdrawn type is entirely unaware of such feelings, and whenever they
come to the fore is shocked by them because they violate the dictates of the withdrawal solution.
These dictates are, "You must look benignly and detachedly at all human beings, knowing their
weaknesses and good qualities, but without being bothered or affected by either." This, if true,
would indeed be serenity. But no human being is ever quite as serene. Hence such dictates are
unrealistic and unrealizable. They, too, include pride and hypocrisy: pride, because this detachment
seems so godlike in its justice and objectivity. In reality one's view may be just as colored by what
another thinks, as is the case with the submissive type. But being too proud to admit that an exalted
one can be touched by human weaknesses, such a person tries to rise above all that. This is not
possible. Since this type, too, is as much dependent on others as the other two types, the dishonesty
is just the same. And since the detachment is not true and cannot ever be true if it is used as a
pseudo-solution, such a person must also fall short of the standards and dictates of this particular
idealized self-image. This will make him or her just as self-contemptuous, guilty, and frustrated as
are the other two types when they fall short of their respective standards.
Serenity in the healthy way will not cause you to hide from emotions, experience, life, and
your own conflicts; love and power in their healthy forms will give you a healthy detachment when
looking at yourself so that you will truly become more objective. True serenity is not avoiding
experience and emotions which may be painful at the moment but might yield an important key
when the courage is there to go through them and find what is behind them.
It is very possible not to experience any longing for pleasure, fulfillment, happiness. In fact, you may
be completely resigned to a life of serene detachment, while underneath craving and dissatisfaction
do a great deal of damage. The superimposed denial of the longing for pleasure supreme may seem
to be expedient because the psyche may feel endangered if it were to give vent to it. In such cases
the perverted instinct of self-preservation is stronger. But that does not mean that, stifled as it may be, it does not do equal damage.
t seems paradoxical to postulate that both involvement and detachment must exist
in the healthy psyche. Again there must be a twofold approach to the understanding of this seeming
contradiction. If detachment is indifference because you are afraid to be involved and unwilling to
risk pain and scared of loving, then detachment is a distortion of the real attitude. If involvement
means merely an expression of a super-tense will that your infantile insistence on having what you
want right away generates, then the healthy, productive version of involvement is inverted.
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