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Non-attached love?
nakazcid
Somewhere in Dixie, y'all Veteran
Non-attachment is a cornerstone of Buddhist practice. So how can I love someone if I'm not attached to them? Perhaps I'm a little mixed up about the English definition of "attached" vs. the Buddhist definition. I have a fuzzy notion of the Buddhist definition implying that I have expectations of the object of my attachment, but I'm not sure that's exactly right either.
What does non-attached love look like, in terms of a romantic relationship? Does romance imply attachment? Is it possible to be in a marriage without attachment?
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I think that most relationships, if not all, have some mixture of love and attachment in them. For me, I'm not after total non-attachment; that sounds a bit too perfectionist and I know the strive for perfectionism always badly fails me, I get disillusioned, and I end up not bothering at all.
Therefore - (for me) - my aim is to make progress, to lessen attachment and to love (which basically means wanting the other person to be happy).
In theory, I don't think it's that complicated, in reality it's one of those 'simple, but not easy' deals.
You can love someone and be completely attached to them, yet understand that you must also practise non-attachment simultaneously....
You've heard, no doubt, the phrase, "If you love them, set them free"...?
That's what non-attachment in Love, entails: Giving the other person complete liberty to determine for themselves when they wish to be free of the attachment between you and them.
While the relationship blossoms, flourishes and bears fruit, you love that person with all your goodwill, compassion physical and psychological love, affection and respect.
But should the relationship be determined to come to an end - for whatever reason, then with the same goodwill, compassion, physical and psychological love, affection and respect - you Let. Them. Go.
Hm. I have a husband and 3 children. Of course I am quite attached to them and would be shattered if something happened to any of them.
I guess to me what it means is, they are a huge part of my world. But I don't make them my world. They are people, even my 6 year old son, with their own paths to take in life. I play a role in their lives, and that role changes constantly. My oldest is about to leave home for college, so my role as his mom will change drastically then (and has already over the past couple years).
To me, the Buddhist non-attachment means not putting my fears and expectations on them. To allow them the freedom to be who they are, whatever that might mean. And to allowing the same for myself so that I don't lose myself in my relationships. It means learning to accept that no matter how much I think something should be done a certain way (whether that means chores and schoolwork or romance) I have to allow them to do things their way. I've learned a lot of new things by doing that, but it certainly isn't always easy and I most certainly don't always succeed.
But it allows me to guide and learn. Sometimes I am tempted to just say "no! You can't do that, I won't allow it." but I refuse to kill someone else's passion for things out of my fear or anxiety or refusal to let go.
So yes, "if you love someone, set them free" but it goes far beyond simply letting them go if they want out of the relationship. It means letting them go of your fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams, expectations. Provide roots and a safe place, but not chains. Be the breaker of chains!
@nakazcid, that's a pretty good question.
To me it's the difference between realistic love and unrealistic love. As an exaggerated example, think of the teenaged girl who is head over heels over the boy's basketball star at her school. She ain't got a chance, except in her lurid imagination. That's unrealistic love.
Then there's someone like I imagine Karasti being. A dedicated wife and mother. She does her best for her family, but also maintains her perspective of what marriage and motherhood is for her and the members of her family.
I guess it's sort of like the old skit I once saw on television. The woman says, "Henry, would you climb the highest mountain for me?" He responds, "Yes, dear." And goes out and climbs Mount Everest. Upon his return, the wife asks if he would cross the burning desert for her. He does. When he returns, she asks if he would swim the deepest ocean for her. He does. When he gets back home she says, "I want a divorce." Bewildered, he asks why. She responds, "You never take me anywhere."
Love has nothing to do with attachment.
When we love someone out of attachment, our "love" is love for how WE feel about them. This is selfishness, which is the opposite of love.
Love is not really a feeling ... it is the ACTION of loving someone. As shown by the mother who takes care of her child, the spouse who stands by their partner when things get tough, the person who sets aside their own need in order to help the other person achieve their need.
Love is about giving.
Attachment is about getting.
And all love springs from compassion, from empathy, from not being focused on ourselves.
In all of us unenlightened people, we operate out of our attachment ... a lot. There is nothing wrong with it. Attachment doesn't go away, but over time the Buddhist gradually learns to jus allow it, without it pushing the around.
Buddhist love springs from this:
We start to see, operating within ourselves, as the nature result of our meditative practice, how WE are the ones who create our own unhappiness. Through our "wrong view". We start to develop great compassion for our ignorance - our attachments and aversions - which are the cause of our suffering.
The more clearly we observe this and understand this within ourselves, the more clearly we see that others are just like ourselves. And that they too, through lack of understanding, are unnecessarily causing their own unhappiness.
All Buddhist love springs from compassion, and that compassion starts with self-knowledge, gained through meditation. Enhanced through OTHER Buddhist practices, but ultimately originating through our insight and mindfulness on ourselves.
ER... yes, it has. of course it has. You cannot have Love without Attachment.
No, you misunderstand.
We don't love someone out of attachment. We love them - and then become attached to them...
No.
Love IS a feeling.
Attachment is the Action.
A mother is attached to her child by an emotional bond of Love.
Standing by your partner when things get tough, is 'the whole package'. It entails love, respect, attachment and dedication.
Setting aside one's own needs is selflessness and altruism.
Love doesn't necessarily come into it, there.
Not so.
Love is about Honouring and liberating.
Attachment can be healthy or unhealthy, but it gets you nothing.
Not so. When we love, we engage with a desire to also be loved.
No. On the contrary, I think we have to work at it in a steadfast and conscious manner. It is after all, the fundamental reason behind Suffering/dukkha
As I said....
That all depends whether one can develop a healthy attachment, or whether it develops/transforms into an unhealthy one...
Yeah, but when you meet a hot guy/chick on a date, and you click, that kind of deep philosophy don't even get a look-in at that point!
You're mistaking different kinds of loves, and making a whole stewpot muddle out of this, in my opinion.
The moment you love, you are attached.
How you process that attachment, determines your ultimate treatment and attitude, behaviour and contribution.
This is going to ruffle some feathers but at a retreat I went to, the teacher said that love is a really hard attachment. Basically there are two kinds of love. Unconditional and conditional.
He said most/all people in a relationship do not love their partner unconditionally. They love themselves. (Meaning they love what the partner does for them) of course it's both ways. It's conditional meaning that certain conditions cause it to deteriorate. Normally if the partner starts making you unhappy. Therefore you actually love yourself and not the partner.
He said there IS unconditional/selfless love.
This is like a mother and child, no matter what the child does . The love will always remain constant.
He also said an awakened mind loves unconditionally. But everybody is seen as equal. It's like an undercurrent of compassion and love. But not as intense as emotional love.
I personally would probably agree with this, I love my wife and would die for her but if things got bad between us, it wouldn't be the same. I can see that. And of all the girls, I chose the right one "for me" not for her.
Luckily she feels the same XD
I think in non-attached love the difference is the greater quality of equanimity. There are feelings of affection and feelings of peace but those feelings come and go freely.
@Earthninja thanks for sharing that. Unconditional Love itself is something worthy of strenuous and continued meditation in my humble and uneducated opinion.
I think a big point is that people are changing just as much as the winds are changing. We tend to fixate on a definition of a person or a mold they should fit, and our stubbornness (which is not very obvious to us most of the time) tends to hold us back from simply loving what comes.
I guess it's tricky because a relationship implies some level of stability, and a realized being probably doesn't mind having the entire rug pulled up from under them at a moment's notice. For the rest of us, I think it takes some time and good communication to get to a point where you can trust your partner to do great things, and not worry they are doing something to violate your bond.
Love without attachment? I think you nailed it on the head when you said that the definition of attached is different (if subtly) in the Buddhist context. You can be realized and look like a clinging mother or father or husband or wife, but inside you are free, and you are with the flow, natural and not blocked... It is an inner quality, that love that is unconditional.
There's a quote of the Buddha, and I am poorly paraphrasing here, but he said that two people who can find love in each other and grow together are fortunate indeed.
I think it's more about non attachment to the situations you are in, instead of non attachment to the person you are with. Ultimately, parting ways is always difficult, but pouring your life's effort into growing your love for your partner and for those around you is essentially the goal of practice, as far as I understand it.
"Love (loving heartedness) is the temporary and the ultimate benefit" - Garchen Rinpoche
Very interesting thread.
The word love as @federica explains has a range of meanings. Using the Buddhist term for a relationship, 'I have compassion for you' rather than 'I love you' is not recommended.
I prefer the word 'love' to 'compassion' precisely because of the range of meanings.
Unconditional love is the ideal but in a sense the most compassionate. It trancends or encompasses the lesser emotional, sexual, tribal, exchange mechanisms.
So in this spiritual sense love is a condition, not conditional. It is a condition of being 'in Love' but not limiting or objectifying but also expressing through the range of our being and experience.
Increase in Love - Dervish Dharma
@Earthninja that's a really significant teaching. It seems to me that in a relationship there is a spectrum of love, with a sort of self-absorbed, selfish love on one end and something closer to unconditional love (metta?) on the other end. However, it would seem that if one realizes enlightenment, that a romantic relationship would collapse since one would love all beings equally. One thing that has troubled me (and my fiancee) is how the Buddha left his wife and child to pursue enlightenment. This view of romantic/familial love is probably one of the reasons.
Myself, I'm nowhere close to enlightenment, so it's not an immediate concern. I love my fiancee dearly, but now I have to ask myself, do I love her (in the sense of metta), or do I love how she makes me feel? Not a comfortable thing to look at.
Attached love = I love you only because you make me feel good.
Non attached love = I love you regardless of how you make me feel.
I disagree. Non-attached love is actually Unconditional Love. But there is still attachment there.
I think that you can still have emotional love with your fiancée once enlightened. I mean I can only hypothesise but sensations and emotions will still arise. Just nothing to land on right?
I'm sure an enlightened being still makes jokes, feels sadness as well as loves their partner.
But it is seen as just a story. A beautiful dramatic story.
@nakazcid you say you are not even close to enlightenment.
What if I told you, you are already enlightened but you believe you are not
?
[warning contains spoilers]
The Buddha was human. Strange but true. Your situation, understanding and response is different. The enlightened meet their responsibilties, indeed they take on more. I believe the Buddhas wife became a nun, his son became a monk. His dad was probably left to sulk that his plan for a warrior king failed.
In the unpopular Hinayana tradition that I follow, we start with self, extend to situation/family and then the wider community.
You will be fine.
Agree that "unconditional" (eg. mothers) love is attached love, the condition being related by "flesh and blood." The unconditional love is actually conditional too.
How is this?
Non attached love = I love you regardless of how you make me feel and regardless of who/what you are and what you do.
@nakazcid said "One thing that has troubled me (and my fiancee) is how the Buddha left his wife and child to pursue enlightenment. This view of romantic/familial love is probably one of the reasons."
They (Buddha and his wife) talked about stuff like any two people who love each other, and they both felt the very same way about the suffering in the world and they both felt kind of helpless about it, but were doing what they could to relieve some of it. She completely understood his yearning and she laid out his clothes to wear that night she knew he was going to leave, and had his assistant, Channa prepare the horses for the two of them (his assistant and him).
@silver That story may well be fictional. Consider this account apparently given by the Buddha.
The information came from Thich Nhat Hahn's biography of the Buddha, Old Path White Clouds, if that means anything.
isn't non-attached love also 'love without discrimination'? For example, I love cats, all sorts of them. Fluffy, short-haired, scratchy, mean or stinky. lol. I sometimes imagine, I will know my spiritual progress if I can expand that indiscriminate love to other beings.
Sounds like a plan.
Expand the meow into metta?
http://buddhist-meditation-techniques.com/loving-kindness-meditation/
I love everybody unconditionally but I wouldn't stay in a romantic relationship unconditionally.
Ajahn Brahm explains love this way...well, sort of this way, because I can't find either of the two copies of the book he says it in at the moment. Probably loaned out for the moment - gifted out when they don't return it.
True love is when the object of your affections declares that he or she would be happier with your best friend and you rejoice with them both that they have found a way to increase their happiness.
Hey @yagr, good to see you. That's bound to blow someone's mind.
@yagr has always had that ability with me. Put him in the same room with @Tony_A_Simien and the walls might buckle....
More or less I'm a puppet of my selfish genes
"From the genocentric view, the more two individuals are genetically related, the more sense (at the level of the genes) it makes for them to behave selflessly with each other."
"Gene selection provides one explanation for kin selection and eusociality, where organisms act altruistically, against their individual interests (in the sense of health, safety or personal reproduction), namely the argument that by helping related organisms reproduce, a gene succeeds in "helping" copies of themselves (or sequences with the same phenotypic effect) in other bodies to replicate."
I love cats too, but I don't know in which way I help my genes for loving them. Maybe that's not eusociality
Maybe you have cat genes?
If you define attachment as an emotional connection, then yes, love is an attachment. All emotional connections must be attachments because somewhere is the possibility of suffering, from that connection being severed or the trust betrayed. So in this case, to be enlightened means feeling no emotional bonds with anyone because that might lead to pain. If nothing else, when someone you love hurts, you hurt in return. Your only choices are to retreat to an isolated hilltop or become some sort of robot around people, incapable of love. Does this sound like enlightenment to you?
There are people incapable of love, of basic empathy. They usually were taught not to love as children. We call them sociopaths and hope they don't kill too many people before we catch them.
So obviously this is not what Buddhists are trying to talk about when we say attachments should be avoided. But it's hard to put the distinction into words. The first thing you have to comprehend is that you can't avoid pain in life, no matter what you try to reject or eliminate. The ability to cause you pain cannot be the yardstick you judge something as good or bad. Pain is a part of living. To be born is to feel pain. To grow old is to feel pain. Can you avoid either one of these? We feel pleasure and we feel pain and both are a part of being alive.
The type of attachment Buddha seems to be talking about is clinging to an ideal. We all have an ideal world built into our minds. We have a vision of what a proper marriage or family, how a wife or husband or child should be, how they should act and respond to our needs. We can become attached to these ideals and not see the wife as an independent person with their own needs and karma to work out. The reality doesn't match the ideal we're attached to, and the relationship becomes a pool of suffering. But since you're clinging to the ideal, you refuse to let go of the relationship. You fight harder to cram the person into the role you've assigned for them.
Anyway, that's the best I can do to explain how I see it. I had a wonderful marriage of many years to a woman who sometimes drove me crazy. But I'm sure I did the same to her. Maybe it didn't cause me to be enlightened, but it made me a better person.
In a way true because I have much more a cat-like mentality than a dog-like. And I like more cats company than people's.
I sometimes feel that way, though at least people don't poo in my garden all the time....well, not so far.
@Cinorjer Intuitively, I sense much truth in your post. At the same time, though, Buddhism seems to promote the monastic ideal, with ties to the family severed, or at least diminished. The "serious" Buddhist seems encouraged to avoid relationships, or at least romantic ones. I see them as an opportunity to set someone else's happiness above your own.
I have to agree. Buddhism was, until it hit the West, a monastic religion and cutting ties with the family was assumed to be part of following a Buddhist path while laypeople could only hope to gain merit by supporting the temples.
I think our religion has yet to evolve completely into one where the highest rewards are available to laypeople. It will take some redefining of what it means to practice Buddhism, actually.
Cats poos are so tiny and compact compared to the human shit
They (cat ones) are easy to pick if you don't want to fertilise your garden in a natural way!
Cat-poo is toxic and dangerous and can pass on the nastiest of diseases.
If felines are supposed to be so intelligent, you'd think they'd have the common courtesy or decency to pick up after themselves.
I find it very difficult to love' the domestic cat when it wreaks so much havoc and destruction to our natural avian wildlife....Although it is argued that such devastation is not as serious as once thought.
To be fair.
Toxic and dangerous shits?! You can get toxoplasmosis from many sources, not only from cat shits. And cats get toxoplasmosis from raw meat people feed them. My cats have been indoor cats. It's not cats false if their owners are not responsible and let them wander around freely.
http://www.komitee.de/en/projects/italy
I have to deal with cat poo almost daily. So far I haven't caught leprosy, toxoplas-whatever, or any other malady. All poo, regardless of the source, is disgusting and a potential vector for infection.
This is getting too off-topic.
If you feel strongly enough, and really want to begin a thread on the virtues and vices of domesticated felines, be my guest.
Thanks.
This is a great post. I am struggling with this in my relationship.
You're having a bit of a rough time of it at the moment, aren't you @LoveWins ...?
@frederica....ya think? Lol
"Non-attached love?"
If one is too busy 'thinking' about what is what, one could miss out of the whole experience and so could the object of one's attention...
Generosity is a form of non-attached love