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Question about freedom from suffering/attachment
Hello, this is my first post here.
Is it possible to love without being attached? I know Buddhism teaches that attachment is the root of suffering, but it emphasizes compassion and love. I don't see how I can love without being attached.
Although I am new at Buddhism, I've found myself remembering to consider things in its context, and this normally calms me/allows me to react in a mindful way. I'm struggling with this in my current situation though, I'm losing my best friend, whom I love almost more than anyone in the world. So many negative emotions are surfacing - hurt, rage, selfishness, pride, etc.
Perhaps I just need someone to tell me that it is possible to love without attachment, as attachment is whats causing these horrible emotions that are pushing me into a depression
Is it possible to love without being attached? I know Buddhism teaches that attachment is the root of suffering, but it emphasizes compassion and love. I don't see how I can love without being attached.
Although I am new at Buddhism, I've found myself remembering to consider things in its context, and this normally calms me/allows me to react in a mindful way. I'm struggling with this in my current situation though, I'm losing my best friend, whom I love almost more than anyone in the world. So many negative emotions are surfacing - hurt, rage, selfishness, pride, etc.
Perhaps I just need someone to tell me that it is possible to love without attachment, as attachment is whats causing these horrible emotions that are pushing me into a depression
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Comments
love and attachments are not connected.
The only feelings that attachments creates are of fear, hatred, anxiety, anger etc...
it doesn't mean you forget about this person.
This is similar to being devastated by someone who is dying.
if it were you that were dying, don't you think that you would prefer sharing your last moments with love and happiness with your loved ones? Or do you think you would prefer that your last moments be spent watching your loved one suffering terribly and crying uncontrollably?
But as a layperson, it's fine to have girl/boy friends, get married, have kids, work, save money, buy a house, buy a car, go on holiday, and so on... but at the same time trying to let go of greed, lust, and other impure thoughts as best we can. I think, we need to find a balance; but we need not practice renunciation to the same extent as the monks.
We only know what we know as unenlightened sentient beings. The answer to your very first question is yes, it is possible to love someone without attachment. This question comes up like clockwork about every month or so. There are extensive writings on it by various teachers, including the Dalai Lama. I recommend you seek out some of those. But essentially, it involves loving unconditionally, and without any expectation of anything in return. For normal humans, it's pretty tough.
Grief at the loss (death) of a loved one is not unenlightened. It's perfectly normal. Abnormal grief (wailing, not letting go, etc) is a manifestation of attachment. Being sad and grieving is not attachment. It's just grieving at the loss.
I'm not saying they aren't normally synonymous in this day and age but instead that they don't have to be. In fact, I think that love without attachment is much more powerful in fact. It allows you to truly love something but without the greed, fear, jealousy and doubt that plague many relationships. It is the attachment that causes these emotions and what is causing your reaction to your situation. You love your friend and don't want that to change but change is inevitable and inarguable, so accept it and learn from your suffering. Learn to love them not because of who they are or who they've been but because right now you have that chance and tomorrow you may not.
At least in the way we often think of love. Loving unconditionally, is impersonal, it's in the gestures, it's about giving love without ever wanting anything in return. It doesn't care about the particularities of the person whom it loves. It can be a criminal or your best friend. Unconditional love would render them as worthy of the same kind of love.
Unconditional love doesn't bond people together. It's much like loving an old person who is about to die. You don't care about becoming the best of friends, you just help the old lady cross the street out of selflessness.
Either the thing you are grasping at disappears, or you yourself disappear.
It is only a matter of which occurs first."
Goenka
Althoughyou CAN love without being attached that doesn't mean that you HAVE to be, all else that i can say is this: Remember them how they want you to be remembered.
typo?
you certainly seem to be making the case for love without attachment in the rest of the post.
The Dalai Lama said once that it's ok to express emotions when appropriate, such as sadness at the loss of a loved one. That's normal. You let yourself cry, then it passes, and you go on. Buddhism isn't about all emotions being bad. Joy and sadness are what make us human. Jealousy or abnormal grief are signs of attachment.
But, Toquade, since you are experiencing emotions related to attachment, you need to address that before you spin into a depression. A good book to give you practical and effective exercises to work through this is "Good Grief Rituals", by Elaine Childs-Gowell.
No typo. The rest of the post describes love without attachment yes - something I think is impossible for a human.
Still, we should walk the Noble Eightfold Path the best we can. Whether we will actually experience unconditional love, or enlightenment, or nirvana, or whatever.... that we should just leave aside for now...
When we hear that the Eightfold Path leads to the cessation of suffering, we think that it leads to the end of all grief, sorrow, fear, anger, etc. Actually, it is when we let go of our inability to let suffering be real for us (let it be a "truth" of our reality in the here and now) that we experience the true liberation.
I'd like to advice each of us, myself included, not to mistake our own experience for universal truths. While the Buddha may have stated to believe nothing that you have not experienced, that is not the same as feeling what you haven't experienced is untrue or false. Just because love and attachment are intertwined in this day and time, and because they are our experience, does not make them ever present and does not make the existence of love without attachment bullshit or impossible. As the Buddha would have probably said, we just have a little (or more likely, a lot) of dust in our eyes.
Also, I'll just point out that words are tricky. They at best communicate what you believe them to mean, which makes them user dependent and a hard way to communicate complex concepts. So, while you believe attachment and love are impossibly linked, that is in part because of your understanding and experience of love and attachment, which is different than mine and all other humans to some small or possibly great degree.
Last but not least I'll mention that we should each work to shield ourselves from dualistic thoughts. Love does not have to be either attached or unattached. Love with attachment does not have to exist or not exist. It is easier, for me at least, to think of these concepts as circular. I.e., there is love with attachment and love without attachment and many, many, many levels (which isn't the right word but I hope communicates my thought closely enough) of in between, of grayness, of middle ground. So, while I've experienced love that is full of attachment and as a normal human it may be impossible for me to truly love without some level of attachment, I can work to be conscious of this attachment and it's role in my suffering.
As always, thanks to each of your for expanding my concepts of these subjects. I'm very thankful that each of you takes the time to engage is such fruitful discussion.
--Chris
I think this "attachment in love" is a false question. I think everyone is very conscious of their attachment level when it comes to love. And it does't make anything better, other than making us painfully aware of our own masochism.
Well it's kind of cheap talking about attachment when one can't get rid of it. All this talks about detachment and the only prescription is to realize impermanence and all that. And even if you do you still cry in the end. One starts to wonder how much Buddhism can actually help one with these things.
changed countless peoples life completely.
This is why philosophizing without practice has it's limits. one can't even imagine what one has not even tasted.
Its like the teachings are a plant and you plant it in the soil of your experience. But the right conditions of meeting the teachings have to occure. Like digging a hole and watering in the hole and putting fertilizer and so forth.
Does that sound good?
What you seem to be saying is that human experience and emotion are entirely determined and that there is nothing that can be done to change them. The whole point of Buddhism is to gradually diminish attachment until hopefully it is ultimately gotten rid of. You seem to be saying that there is no point at all to Buddhist study and practice. I think it's highly debatable that "we still cry in the end". There are those who have visibly shown that through Buddhist practice and study, and through other means, attachment can be diminished to the point at which things are experienced and reacted to with a great deal more equanimity than would be the case without Buddhist practice and study and/or psychotherapeutic or other mind-training strategies.
You make a very unequivocal and definitive statement about something that is not necessarily true, and in so doing, you say that Buddhist practice and study is essentially pointless and fruitless.
I suggest you read up on the works of Richard Davidson and others which shows that meditative practice acts on the "neuroplasticity" of the brain which in turn affects interpretation, reactivity, and therefore behavior. It's well documented that Buddhist-type meditation can have profound effects on mood and behavior, and this would seem to indicate that not all mood and behavior is determined in the definitive way you suggest.
Expressing emotions is good, releasing the pressure. Good for all negative emotions.
How to express them is the key.
If you have anger built up and express it by punching somebody, not good.
"You let yourself cry, then it passes, and you go on."
the same with anger, anxiety, fear etc...
"You let yourself feel angry, then it passes, and you go on."
This is how to let go in general. Let the emotion be, don't push it away, don't repress it, don't hate it etc... just observe it for what it is. Then it dissolve. Then your body learn to react a different way in this situation (or learn to not react at all with negative emotional responses, just remain equanimous, calm, happy).
Feeling grief and sadness is normal indeed, in as much as feeling anger toward somebody whom you perceived did something wrong to you.
but normal is not equivalent to enlighten, liberated.
You must consider the Dalai Lama and his own challenges. he is usually addressing the lay people and the uninitiated.
He could say things like "liberate yourselves from anger", and people will relate. They have seen anger and saw the obvious devastation of it.
But if he said "liberate yourself from sadness and grief" people usually react with "grief and sadness is what makes us human, i don't want to become a zombie!"
Unless one has a deeper understanding of the truth, what is suffering, what are negative emotional reactions, all the Dalai Lama would get by saying this would be to alienate people and be farther away from his goal.
You care for someone without personal interests.
Of course it is difficult to do.
But the word 'love' needs to be defined.
The ordinary romantic love does not apply here.
We are animals. Sure enough, our brains have neuroplasticity and can be all but transformed through discipline. But, just as it is possible for an ascetic to starve himself to death despite the animalistic compulsion to eat, so it is possible to train ourselves to produce other equally unnatural results. We are animals. And animals eat. Or die.
And I think attachment is more of a human NEED, than buddhism usually recognizes. Certainly, like the need for nourishment, it can be ignored/tamed/understood, but is that productive for most people?
We are attached to food are we not? We are attached to other people's affection. Note how I didn't use the world love. A baby doesn't know what love is...conditional, unconditional...but the baby needs to be caressed as studies all over the place show...if he is to become a healthy human being.
Love is a construct. Unconditional, conditional...whatever. But NEEDS are always connected with attachment. We are attached to food, we are attached to our mothers, we are attached to our kids, to our lovers, to everything that satisfies our NEEDS. Not our wants, our NEEDS, as human beings. As animals. Attachment is an animalistic REQUIREMENT for survival.
Monks might refrain from sex, for example, and not recognize it as a need. But in a desert island populated by a handful of chaste monks and nuns....the human species would not thrive. Because of their detachment from something that might be FUNDAMENTAL to human happiness and survival.
What I question is the Buddhist perspective of what is a NEED and what is a WANT. What I question is how it views attachment. We are attached to food. Our body suffers, if such a need is not satisfied. And food is not the only attachment required for happiness and survival.
yes but the question is how many of theses attachments are actually "needs".
turn out to be a tiny fraction of what non-spiritual people usually believe.
People are attached to everything under the sun and are suffering from all of these.
Also turn out that suffering because of all attachments is unnecessary, regardless if it is a need or not.
Well that was my implied question. That's my line, that's what I'm asking
Say what?
Turns out anything can be rendered unnecessary by choice.
Buddhism will give you the answers, or more precisely, give you the tool to realize them.
i meant to say "regardless if it is a need or not"
Oh, if only..! I spent 14 years in a very destructive relationship because of my inability to see and admit that my attachment was very strong and very harmful. I could not leave because I felt very strongly that I would die or be miserable forever without this person.
It's easy to feel that a situation is normal or healthy until you get some distance (detachment..or perhaps "non-attachment" would be a better term) and a clearer perspective, whether through therapy, studying the dharma, meditation, etc.
The problem was that there as another part who was determined to stuck with it.
Being conscious in itself doesn't solve any problems. At least for me it doesn't. I'm nothing if not completely aware of by my own problems lol.
satisfaction is a short lived feeling.
If one were to use this as life motto, this person would live a life of chasing that feeling of satisfaction, without ever feeling contended.
I'm not sure what you base this on.
No, I honestly believed that that was 'love' in the best possible sense.
Very well put!
If you focus on your own pain from a relationship that is changing, then you suffer. Do you really love your friend? Don't you want them to be happy, also? The anger and frustration you feel is because you are clinging to some concept of what your relationship should be. Your friend is not an object that belongs to you that is being stolen. It's a person with their own karma to work out.
Yes, it hurts. Some changes hurt. That's the reality of life. Buddha didn't promise us a life without pain. He promised a way to eliminate suffering. Without the capacity to feel pain we lose the capacity to feel joy.
You don't have to let that pain turn into anger directed at either your friend or yourself. You don't have to let normal sadness turn into deep depression. People heal. Even pain is impermanent.
Sure, but you knew it wasn't bringing you joy.
No, not for the longest time. It was that realization, after 14 years, that helped me to finally let go. For one thing, the relationship wasn't 100% misery, that would probably have helped in terms of leaving..for another thing, there were always perfectly plausible reasons for my unhappiness, or so I believed..and so many "ifs" that I turned to:
...if we moved in together, if we were finally officially married, if we were just living somewhere better, if we just had more money, if he would just not cheat on me, if I would just not cry or get worked up about it, if I was skinnier, if I wore more makeup and dresses, if I was more the way he wanted me to be, etc, etc.
In hindsight I can look back and see how badly attached I was to this person and this relationship to put up with so much for long, but I'm also in a better place now, mentally and emotionally speaking. And part of that is because of recognizing the suffering both by my particular situation and caused by my attachment, not simply by the fact of being in love. Without that codependency, I might still have been in the relationship, but I highly doubt I'd have stayed in for as long as I did. Hope this clarifies..
So I vow henceforth to have 1 raisin per day and coffee only in the morning. 10 push ups. Then floss teeth. Twice. Then dust the windows. Then have my shower while singing. Then meditate for 2 hours. Then read dharma teachings.