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- Or being of benefit to
others turns into a duty, or a way of trying to feel good about themselves.
- I’m afraid that what many Western Buddhists are practicing in the relational area is not
nonattachment, but avoidance of attachment. Avoidance of attachment, however, is not
- freedom from attachment. It’s still a form of clinging— clinging to the denial of your
human attachment needs, out of distrust that love can be reliable.
- Many of us who are drawn to Buddhism are avoidant attachment types
in the first place. When we hear teachings on nonattachment it’s like: “Oh that
sounds familiar. I feel really at home here.” In this way a valid dharma teaching
becomes used to support our defenses.
- One way it blocks ripening is through making spiritual teachings into
prescriptions about what you should do, how you should think, how you should
speak, how you should feel. Then our spiritual practice becomes taken over by
what I call “the spiritual superego”— the voice that whispers “shoulds” in our
ear. This is a big obstacle to ripening, because it feeds our sense of deficiency.
One Indian teacher, Swami Prajnanpad, whose work I admire, said that
“idealism is an act of violence.” Trying to live up to an ideal instead of being
authentically where you are can become a form of inner violence if it splits you in
two and pits one side against the other. When we use spiritual practice to “be
good” and to ward off an underlying sense of deficiency or unworthiness, then it
turns into a sort of crusade.
- From my perspective as an existential psychologist, feeling is a form of
intelligence. It’s the body’s direct, holistic, intuitive way of knowing and
responding. It is highly attuned and intelligent. And it takes account of many
factors all at once, unlike our conceptual mind, which can only process one thing
at a time. Unlike emotionality, which is a reactivity that is directed outward,
feeling often helps you contact deep inner truths. Unfortunately, traditional
Buddhism doesn’t make a clear distinction between feeling and emotion, so they
tend to be lumped together as something samsaric to overcome.