Wescli Wardest wrote: Love verses attachment…
“Only choices made in love are compassionate. There are no exceptions. Do you have the courage to act with an empowered heart without attachment to the outcome? If not, you have no ability to give or experience compassion. That is the shocking truth.” ~Gary Zukav
Love is an emotion and attachment is an expectation that elicits an emotional response.
“He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.” ~Chanakya
Would have to disagree that attachment is the root of all suffering. I believe that fear is the greatest negative motivator which can lead to or cause our suffering. And attachment leads to fear. There are negative motivators that are a part of life and we would lose perspective of the fragile and special meaning of positive motivators without them.
“Pray to God that your attachment to such transitory things as wealth, name, and creature comforts may become less and less every day.” ~Ramakrishna
“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.” ~Simone Weil
The material world plays to our need for acceptance and our attachment to it. This is a condition which in part has led to our enslavement to the world of today. And so many have mistaken love for attachment and can no longer see the difference.
this was the line that stood out the most:
Love is an emotion and attachment is an expectation that elicits an emotional response.
when i read that i thought "exactly!"
because i can instantly think of like a thousand examples of times when i was angry or hurt because my expectations werent realized
but, Edan has opened a couple of threads recently that i think have bearing on the conversation
Grief, is it ever over?
and
Sentimentality
which are both about a kind of attachment that it is hard to justify categorizing as "expectation"
i generally like and agree with your point about fear, and negative motivators
The material world plays to our need for acceptance and our attachment to it.
yes i agree, but in regards to our desire for acceptance, i think theres a useful side to it too
in evolutionary terms being rejected could equal death since we just arent equipped biologically to survive on our own
socially, our societies are so complicated that its easy to be or seem to be rejected for any number of things, some of them totally stupid and arbitrary
but at a basic level being rejected CAN be an indicator that something is actually wrong with us, or that we are doing something in the wrong way, which could also potentially imply that there is something wrong with us, but at the very least it means (in this context) that we are not understanding something that we should understand, and that it is probably going to take require effort to improve
and we all understand this at some level
case in point
its not going to take an observer long to see that this is an example of a persona that will not be accepted, and why
i think im talking too much on this single point lol but basically acceptance is important in some ways
This is a condition which in part has led to our enslavement to the world of today. And so many have mistaken love for attachment and can no longer see the difference.
yeah i think thats good, but is there a conceptual frame work that we can use to review our individual circumstances and tell the difference?
a definitive set of criteria, like a checklist, that we can apply to our attachments to determine which is love and which is only attachment?
and is attachment NECESSARILY bad? is there any way that an attachment can be healthy?
if so how do we tell the difference between the healthy and unhealthy?
and how do we determine whether or not we are enslaved?
and if we can determine it, does that immediately free us?
if not, what will?
lol
why is water wet? why does the sun shine?? WHAT HAVE I GOT IN MY POCKET??? :silly:
i dont know how this reads over on your side of things but im not being argumentative, your post got my wheels spinning
