We all have strong desires in life. By themselves, they should not get in the way of your being happy. However, when you are so attached to them that you cannot let them go, or when happiness is contingent upon the satisfaction of these desires, they prevent you from being happy. To learn to be happy, you must learn to be unattached, both to things that you do not have, and to things that you do have.
Yogic, Buddhist, and Taoist philosophies all recommend the practice of nonattachment in order to progress toward spiritual happiness. Even devotional practices teach nonattachment to things of this world.
What is Nonattachment?
Nonattachment is a way of living wherein you actively engage in life, but your happiness is not dependent upon the result of what you do. You continue to care about what happens, but you do not allow it to disturb your happiness, peace, and equanimity.
To be unattached is not to be unaware, uncaring, apathetic, or unsympathetic to what is in your world. Quite the contrary! You can be very aware and can care very deeply. You do so, however, without losing yourself to the world, and without forgetting that your happiness does not depend upon what you do. You are, in a sense, “in the world, but not of the world.” [116]
To be unattached does not mean you lack motivation or are numb to the world around you. It means that your desires do not control your mind and actions. You can live a life that is fully engaged with the world, and you can have desires, but you are not addicted to that which you desire.
Likewise, to be unattached does not mean you should avoid pleasure in life. As you go through life, you should experience the happiness, pleasure, and joy that are natural to you. You should enjoy life. Food, music, art, sex, companionship, family, and friends are all wonderful, and you should enjoy them. Once your happy experience is over, however, you should not allow desire for yet another such experience, or regret about it being over, to make you miserable. Your desire for what you do not have should not be so powerful that it controls you.
There is a line spoken in a thousand movies and novels, which goes something like this: “I had to do it, because if I didn’t I would spend the rest of my life regretting not taking the chance.” It makes for a good story, but doing something because you are afraid you might someday suffer regret is not the best way to approach life. Regret is a sadness resulting from not doing something that might have turned out well, or from doing something that turned out badly. Implicit in regret is the attachment of emotional well-being to what has or has not happened. To be unattached is to savor the way life is now, without even considering how it might have been. Regret cannot take hold of a person who is unattached.
In addition, pain and loss are parts of life, and you should experience these things. If you see someone in pain, it is obviously right to empathize with that person’s unhappiness. However, as you go through life, fully experiencing the good and the bad, you maintain steady contact with your inner self and your inner happiness.
Nonattachment is also living in the world without being so attached to your experiences that you come to believe that what you experience is all that there is. There is a Hindi saying that seems to sum up the spirit of nonattachment: “Keep the heart in God and the head in the world.”[117]
The archery master in Zen in the Art of Archery expressed nonattachment in the following way when he said to his student:
You know already that you should not grieve over bad shots; learn now not to rejoice over the good ones. You must free yourself from the buffetings of pleasure and pain, and learn to rise above them in easy equanimity, to rejoice as though not you but another had shot well. [118]
Desireless Happiness
The happiness that is available without attachment is sometimes called desireless happiness. What destroys happiness is attachment to your desire for what you do not have. When happiness is dependent upon the satisfaction of desire, you cannot experience the happiness that is natural to you. Another way of saying this is you cannot chase after happiness in the world.
To be happy, you need to eliminate your attachment to desires. It is your attachment to them that causes much of your pain and blocks your ability to experience lasting happiness.[119] When you reduce your attachment, you can experience natural happiness. Some call this desireless happiness.[120] Desireless happiness is the happiness that arises when you reduce the hold that your desires have on you.
If you give a child a treat, such as ice cream, the child will probably be happy. Sometimes there is pure, unthinking happiness that for anyone is a joy to behold. But when the child finishes that treat, he or she may want more, and that desire can create misery equal in intensity to the joy previously experienced. Why? The child’s attachment to the desire for previously experienced joy brings misery.
Are we not all this child, no matter how old we are? Why do so many of us “kids” not rejoice in the experience when it is there, and then feel tranquility when it is not? It is because humans are born to crave things.
Unfortunately, a child is stuck with being a child, and every parent knows what happens when you deny a child something he or she very much wants. As we mature, we develop a certain tolerance to unfilled desires without being miserable; this is more true of some of us than others.
The key to desireless happiness is the ability to enjoy something while at the same time remaining perfectly happy not to have it. If your happiness does not depend on having something, then not having that thing cannot block your natural ability to be happy.
Imagine you are sitting and talking with friends, and you are at peace. Then someone gives you a delicious piece of candy. You eat it slowly, savoring its taste, its smell, its texture, and its color. While you are eating it — perhaps letting it luxuriously melt in your mouth so that it will last longer — you immerse yourself in the experience. Then, when you are finished, you forget about it and go back to talking with your friends. You are still at peace. You do not have a desire for another bite of that candy. You remain at peace.
Let me summarize desireless happiness in this way. Your nature is to be happy. However, inevitably, you become attached to thoughts and desires associated with being happy, and these attachments make you want to do specific things to become happy. Often these are things that made you happy in the past, or that someone told you would make you happy. If you rid yourself of the attachments, you still have the desire for these things, but that unfulfilled desire does not block your natural ability to be happy.
Like the child first experiencing ice cream, you allow yourself to experience the joy of the moment, and when the moment is over, its absence does not disturb your ability to be happy.
The Mind’s Attachment to the Personal Narrative
One of the most important requirements for practicing non-attachment is controlling your attention. To learn to be unattached you have to be able to put your attention where you want it, and keep it there. You need to periodically let go of the desires, worries, fears, and obsessions of your mind. Your mind’s attachment to these things is automatic, and learning to control your mind and your attention loosens these attachments.
Unfortunately, the mind resists control. Our attention is used to focusing automatically on the thoughts and perceptions that arise in our minds, and automatically attends to our ongoing story or narrative. This ongoing story involves sense impressions of everything happening around us and inside of us, in real time. The mind keeps track of our entire existence as best it can. It is firmly identified with the ongoing story of our lives. It is important to have times when you disengage from this narrative.
As we get older, we accumulate a history and an awareness of future possibilities. We accumulate a story of ourselves. Our attention becomes more and more involved in the story and less and less involved in the here and now. If I try to detach my attention from my ongoing story, my mind gets anxious. It is uncomfortable about letting the narrative go.
For instance, in meditation I may try to focus my attention entirely on my breathing or some other object of meditation. When I do this, my mind resists, much preferring to keep attending to the sounds around me, the feelings in my body, and the random thoughts that pop into my head. My mind “has a mind of its own” and does not want to go where I tell it to go.
Sometimes I sense a vague fear that if I disengage from my story, my life will fall apart. It is as if constantly attending to my narrative is what keeps it — and me — going. My fear of taking my attention off my personal narrative is analogous to a juggler spinning plates.
We have all seen the juggler who spins plates on sticks. She balances a stick on the stage, puts a plate atop the stick, and starts it spinning. She does the same with another, and another and another, until there are five plates spinning on their sticks. As the first plate starts to spin more slowly, she has to rush over and get it spinning again. Then she sets up another two sticks. She shoots back to three plates that have slowed down nearly to the point where they will fall and gets them going again. She puts up two more plates, and then another, so she finally has ten plates, all spinning. She cannot put up any more plates because she has to keep rushing from plate to plate, speeding them up so they’ll stay on their sticks.
These are entertaining performances, but when I think of such “balancing acts,” I cannot help but think, “This is a picture of my mind at work.” Let me explain. We all construct our version of reality in our minds. It is not a static reality. It is a story or narrative, with scenery, players, plot lines, winners, losers, happiness, and sorrow, all set in motion, and kept in motion by our minds. It is much like the spinning plates. The ongoing drama that represents what we call our lives is kept going, kept spinning, by us, and only by us.
The shame of it is, our minds expend a huge amount of effort keeping the story going. In addition to examining and analyzing what we are doing, as well as what other people may be thinking about us, we remember what we did, think about what we are going to do, and, at some level (not always conscious), worry about everything constantly. Much of this mental activity does not enhance our lives and does not make us happy. Perhaps if we were to focus on fewer things at a time, or even just one thing, we would live better and more happily.
Instead, our many thoughts and fears are like the spinning plates. They demand our attention, and they get it. Like the juggler, we zip from one thought to another. We feel that if we did not attend to a particular thought or worry, we would lose control, and something bad would happen.
But this is not so. You can often let go of most of what you are worrying about, and nothing will happen. After all, you do this every night when you drop off to sleep. Just let the story go! Unlike the plates, life will not come crashing down just because you are not turning to every little thought and worry that comes along. On the contrary, without all kinds of random thoughts and worries sucking up all of your attention, you are free to be who you really are, a peaceful and happy being.
Right now you are like the performer balancing spinning plates on sticks, trying to keep them all in motion so they do not come crashing down around you. To be happy, you have to pull your attention away from the story, at least for a while. You have to loosen the attachment that your ongoing story has on your mind’s attention. Miraculously, the plates will keep spinning.
The Way Attachment Inhibits You
If you allow your happiness to depend upon the result of what you do, this can lead to dissatisfaction and unhappiness. It can also seriously inhibit your ability to succeed at what you do.
It seems that our numerous desires and fears can attach themselves to our skills and abilities, and prevent them from manifesting freely. It is as if these desires and fears had wrapped themselves around our talents and passions like the tentacles of some creature. In some cases, our gifts are so stuck and constricted that we can barely use them. For example, stage fright is an obvious case of fear preventing a talent from expressing itself.
Conventional wisdom says that a strong attachment to winning can be a powerful incentive to achievement; some self-proclaimed sages say that you need to be “hungry” to get anyplace in the world. However, Chuang Tzu warns that the need to win (attachment to winning) can drain you of power.[121] The way that this happens is illustrated in The Way of Chuang Tzu. In “The Need to Win,” the archer who shoots without pressure of an attachment to winning has all of his skill available. Once there is a need to win, his skill is greatly diminished, or gone.
When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets—
He is out of his mind!
His skill has not changed,
But the prize divides him.
He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting—
And the need to win
Drains him of power.[122]
Nonattachment and the Self-Conscious Self
One of the things that keeps us unhappy and dissatisfied with life is our attachment to our ideas, ideals, views, opinions, theories, conceptions, and beliefs. We often make our happiness depend on having a good self-image, opinions with which others agree, and beliefs that are popular and considered meritorious. In other words, happiness is usually associated with the approval of others. You might call this need for approval the self-conscious self.
Attachment to the approval of others can rob us of our ability to do what we want to do. Nowhere is this more apparent than when attachment to the self-image prevents us from doing things that we fear may damage that image. For example:
Susan likes John and wants to ask him for a date. Susan is attractive and articulate, and is usually pretty good at charming people to do what she wants them to do. She is really nervous that John might say no. Finally getting up her courage, she walks over to him and tries to speak, but she cannot do it. Her mind has gone blank, and there are no words. Her fear of rejection and potential damage to her fragile self-image have struck her dumb.
It’s remarkable that when your happiness does not depend on the way you see yourself, you are free to exercise whatever skill you have to express and create. If you can practice nonattachment regarding your self-image, self-consciousness can simply disappear.
Interestingly, self-consciousness frequently disappears all by itself. Anytime you are engaged in an activity in which you are fully present, your self-conscious self may recede into the background. You probably do not notice it. When you do notice it in a situation where you would ordinarily be self-conscious, it can be a memorable experience.
When I was 24, not quite the peak years of self-consciousness but pretty close, I was a volunteer with an organization that gave seminars aimed at self-improvement. This group would hold guest seminars in which guests would be invited and informed about the full seminars. My role was to sit in the seminar, listen to the speaker, and then after the seminar talk to guests, answer their questions, and try to get them to enroll in the full seminars. Once, just as a guest seminar was ending, and I got up to speak, my self-conscious self entirely disappeared. I know this because I was usually quite awkward in talking to people and trying to persuade them to enroll. This time, my self-consciousness was entirely gone. The contrast between my normal way of being and this new way of being was dramatic.
This experience remains memorable for me because the dropping away of my self-consciousness was so sudden. The shift from full-time self-consciousness to no self-consciousness at all was like flipping a switch to reveal a wonderful light that I never knew was there.
Practicing Nonattachment
The mind desires many things, and it is all right to have such desires. You become unhappy and dissatisfied with life, however, when you attach your hopes for happiness to desired circumstances and possessions. When you are attached to desires, they trap your awareness so that you are not free to find the lasting happiness you want.
All of that stuff in your head about what you want and need demands your energy and attention, and probably gets it most of the time. Even if you are not doing anything, even if you are just sitting and trying to relax, or lying in bed trying to go to sleep, all of your endless desires demand your attention.
The practices in this book all serve to free your mind from its attachment to what you want. In all of these practices, you learn to still your mind so that you can free yourself from the desires and fears that crowd your mind. Yes, you will always have desires and fears, but their hold on your attention will be less. You will be able to enjoy your days without your happiness being disturbed by the things that happen to you.