Attachment, Addiction, and Release
Round and round until unbound!
These shifting sands of my psyche have sifted such that now appears a good time to sketch out some thoughts on the titular topics. We’ll see what tumbles out.
This is a sort of collection and continuation of threads begun in this video here:
First, let’s distinguish the healthy psycho-social, developmentally necessary psychological sense of attachment from the momentary, embodied, phenomenological sense, what in Buddhadharma is referred to as upādāna, the taṇhā that underpins it, and the root of avijjā which sets the whole wheel spinning. It appears that, at least in adults, the first can function fluidly while the latter cluster is extinguished.
If we don’t draw this distinction we are liable to get mixed up in fruitless alienation and avoidance of human contact and connection. This is a no good confusion, and, unless one’s plunging into solitary retreat well-prepared for that experience, cutting social bonds entirely appears uniformly bad for the human mammal. In any event, the phenomenon of solitary retreat is in fact supported by and dependent on a dense web of mutuality.
A trouble is that these two senses of attachment are, for most people, tightly entwined. We make selves of us and other persons, and cling relentlessly to our fabrications of and about our friends, family, lovers, even politicians and celebrities, in fact all relations. One can then well understand the rhetorical flourishes of past masters decrying the entanglements of worldly, family life and conventional sociality.
Ah, well.
Whether in ascetic solitude or immersed in the hurly-burly busyness of so called ‘ordinary’ life, the situation is in fact identical. This mind, blind to its own nature, seeks solace and security in fleeting appearances, sundry sensations of sight, sound, emotion and sensual gratification, chasing after heights and delights of states and stages, reaching out from an apparently inescapable and most often unacknowledged sense of lack, of incompleteness born of this root misperception of I, this, and that.
I write this because this has been my own experience, time and again: an ache, an itch, a niggling, creeping, gnawing not-rightness which drives reaching and grasping at food, entertainment, knowledge, samadhi, praise, sex, any and every thing which distracts from this baseless and bottomless well of not-enough, something else, please!
An incomplete catalogue of some snares I’ve been caught in:
Video games, YouTube binges, gooning to pornography or erotica, sinking into the stupor of THC, excessive intake of sugars, carbohydrates, fried and salty foods, scrolling Reddit or Twitter, procrastinating getting that one thing (there’s always some thing) done because of flitting tingles of anxiety, ‘spiritually’ bypassing by leaning on trained ability to enter altered states and neglect practical matters, all these behavioral branches share this one root of ignorance → clinging → attachment.
There is release from all this churning and turning: methodically unbinding body, heart, and mind in ease, learning to live and love as this selfless, self-luminous, empty nature. Display plays yet does not hook, awareness attends yet does not land, desires and delights arise yet do not latch, and every habit conditioned in delusion disbands.
It’s not far, this path is always underfoot.
May we all enjoy this life thus!