Attachment Depreciates Yoga
In yoga practice Attachment to others is a force to recon with. This could be attachment to others or the attachment others have for oneself. Influences are shared. One influence may wipe out another. Influence really means desire transfer from one person to another, whereby the lifestyle of the other person may change under the influence or it may remain the same if there is sufficient resistance to change.
An ascetic may get his attachments under control. He may develop resistance to the desire to latch on to others but he may not change the attitude of persons who are attached to him and whose influence penetrates his nature and becomes manifested as desire.
I was with some friends recently. One of them said that I should move to the area to be in their association. No thought or consideration was given to my other obligations or relationships I have with others elsewhere.
A similar incidence occurred recently on the astral planes, where one person tried to hire me as a teacher without any reference to my earthly body. However such schemes also occur on the astral planes, where someone who has a physical body is requested to stay on the astral plane permanently.
Such offers are supremely selfish because they do not take into account any relation one has with others when these attachments form into a desire force, they lower the ascetic to the plane of the non-yogi person who is related. Then the yogi must do more stringent austerities to elevate himself or herself, and there is a pulling energy which exerts a psychological pressure to cause the yogi to abandon his progress.
Attachments from others, though appreciated and though desired, are a threat to a yogi’s progress.
-
Some Replies from LinkedIn:
-
==========
-
Yuliya Kuzina So people should be selfish because nothing matters and they can't change much anyway?
-
Yuliya Kuzina and what about the detachment from the reality?
-
Michael Beloved In the long term scrubbing the teeth does not matter but still we should do it on a daily basis, because that convention makes sense, common sense. Ultimately the actions to rid the mouth of undesirable odors and bacteria will fail but still we should do our best to eliminate as much of it as we can.
We should reduce selfishness to a minimum until we get sufficient insight to understand and implement the fact that beneficial selfishness means that we act magnanimously because of universal relationship to everyone else, even to persons using lower life forms.
Rudimentary selfishness is the problem because it sees for the short term only and does not take into consideration Jesus’s advice which is that we should do unto others as we would prefer they regard us. If one has to be selfish, then it should be for the long haul so that desirable returns manifest as the future. That means that we act in the interest of others now so that in the future we will get desirable returns. That may b -
Michael Beloved That may be regarded as postive selfishness.
-
Michael Beloved Nature is running its action/reaction system which no man, yogi or God will permanently alter. We do create reverses every now again. We heard of miracles done by yogis and gods (God). But these have not changed the essential nature of Nature.
The environment is preset and our puny arrogance will only make a tiny dent, if even that, in the system of chaos. And yet, we should make the effort to upgrade, to perfect, as much as we can but being realistic to know that Nature will see the end of this in its own way. And doing so with a good attitude, without feeling a loss, playing the game and losing in the end without resentment or feeling of frustration. -
Michael Beloved Detachment from Reality????
Are you kidding?
It should be detachment from our mistaken concepts about reality. It is on us to make our insight be valid in terms of reality.
-
-
-
-
Yuliya Kuzina Am I kidding? Not at all. Discussing.
So if MLK, Ghandi and Mother Theresa sat back in meditation it would make this world better? Or there is no need in trying to make a little contribution (does not equal to revolution)? Our (human) concepts of the ideal world and the glorification of "civilised" world are mistaken. I was talking about that. Not frustration, rather helplessness and desire for a little contribution. I meant detachment from that feeling. The feeling of helplessness. How one can detach from it and sit back in the other reality (the one you are talking about).
I see what you mean though. We are on slightly different pages. Just wanted to raise that question and was hoping for a little hint how to deal with that.
Thanks for the chat. -
Michael Beloved Some of us are like MLK, Gandhi and Mother Theresa. Some of us have left that aside. When some leave it aside, others assume the responsibility for it. But when all is said and done, each of us must face up to the fact that we cannot perpetually be concerned because while we are invested in the welfare of others, nature scuttles the very means of our actions, which is the perishable material bodies.
In the Mahabharata, as great a person and as magnanimous a person as Yudhishthira, left it all aside in the end and faced up to the reality of nature's scuttle operations which it directs even to the best of us.
A fireman must sometimes run just to save himself, because nature may turn against him, put him in peril, target him and force him to abandon his savior-hero role.
As they said to Jesus Christ, He save others now let him save himself. -
MariaElena Cusick May I ask what you mean by 'playing the game' and 'losing in the end'. There is no end and there are no losers.....and what is the name of the game?
-
Michael Beloved The name of the game is survival. Every living creature is involved in the game. It has to be played until the body dies. The end of it for the said person is death of the physical system which was identified as that person. There are losers. Everyone using a living body will lose that body. An entire human civilization is dedicated to protect the body from death. This is why there are hospitals. This is why medicine sells. This is even why some types of yoga or so called yoga is a means of income for so many who pose as teachers.
-
MariaElena Cusick That is an interesting perspective. If there was to be a name given to this 'game' as you call it, then I would like to have the option of calling it 'Time to wake up...rise and shine (literally)!' rather than 'Survival’.
In a world that I believe to be merely an illusion, I feel we all need to wake up rather than battle to survive. What a futile exercise it is to try to hold onto a physical body that is destined to decay*. How exhausting…I am afraid I do not believe we lose the body because it was never truly ours to lose. If I lose my car/house/job/partner/children I will not have lost my Self.
What is 'ours' is who we are not what we have been given (as in the physical vessel that carries on this life journey). In 'losing' our body ...in physical death...we actually awaken to WHO we really are: pure spirit. If that is called ‘losing' then I want to be a ‘loser’. These words winners/losers however are not important. -
MariaElena Cusick In exploring and experiencing the essence of Self (through yoga or whatever you practise in order to touch the silence in your heart), it becomes apparent to me, that there are not sufficient or appropriate words to describe it all; it is indeed ineffable and words seem irrelevant. Even the words spirit/soul... what even is that? Just feel it and simply BE …Know ThySelf (Socrates)
In a period where there is so much uncertainty - on a worldwide scale, it is now high time that we all truly awaken before we physically die. We all need to DIE before we physically die. We all need to wake up. Why? Because once we know who we truly are, we will be liberated from fear. And we will be able to celebrate life every day. Free from fear…only love. Just pure love. When we are all LIVING from a place of LOVE, then the world will be at peace. BE the peace you want the world to BE.
That is a pretty cool prize in this game; I guess we would all be ‘winners’ then. -
MariaElena Cusick …anyone up for a game of ‘Time to wake up/Rise and Shine✨✨?'
I’ll go get the dice and start rolling
-
Caroline Black Interesting. It reminds me of Buddhist philosophy on non attachment and non self. Can you say more about the self in yoga philosophy please ?
Mae Ferguson This summary in my opinion provides a spiritual path of positive energy.
Yuliya Kuzina What about attachment to the planet? How can an extreme empath detach from the sad reality of today's world and ignorance and continue a happy and healthy existence and still be useful to society without being selfish?
Michael Beloved Yuliya, being useful to society may be a stop-gap measure, in the sense that no matter how useful a person can be, the world will continue its wayward path and will eventually be ruined permanently by nature itself, which is the big factor.
No matter how we correct the world, it will resume chaos and inconsideration as we perceive it. Thus like scrubbing teeth every morning, we may continue good works with the understanding that our efforts will again be overpowered, and we will have to scrub again the next morning.
Michael Beloved Caroline, Mark Leary wrote a book called Curse of the self, in which he did not spare any pains in describing our inner condition. It wasn’t New Age. He made no effort to whitewash the self’s chaos and or to pretty-up human viciousness in the struggle for existence.
Questions are:
What is the self?
Is there a self in the first place?
This dogged philosophers for all time. The avoidance of the issue of the self which on one hand appears to be ephemeral and on the other is definite, was expertly demonstrated by Buddha in conversations where others tried to pin him down as to if there was a real self in the first place.
Michael Beloved Obviously the conventional self of you or me is mock up based on the parents of the body, its ethnicity, its education, its functional gender and so on. But that cannot be a permanent anything, because none of our departed ancestors are here as real identities as they were before. Certainly the shifting definition of identity from infancy, to juvenile, to young adult, to elderly adult, shows clearly that any idea to establish the social self as a permanent whatever, is unscientific. And yet we function for the time being in acceptance of that shifting format of a supposed permanent self.
Try boarding a commercial flight without a valid government ID.
What does yoga have to say about the self?
Basically it says that the self should be liberated (mukti)
Who does yoga say is that self?
That depends on the yoga sect, the lineage.
Michael Beloved Some say there is no self. Others say there is a self which is presently confused and need insight to free itself from lower designation, beginning with the present social format.