Letting Go - Attachment to an Image of a Desired Future

“Tomorrow is tomorrow.

Future cares have future cures,

And we must mind today.” 

― Sophocles, Antigone

Previously we've looked at our usually uneasy relationship with impermanence. Most of us don’t like that everything comes and goes and changes. So we attach or cling to things hoping they will steady our experience. We also investigated why we might ignore the interdependence of all things. We're more comfortable turning experience into objects of the mind and assuming that each object has its own separate reality and it stays just that. However, when we accept interdependence, we see that everything relies on many other conditions and probabilities and lets us know we, too, aren't actually separate and isolated either. 

Now I'd like to consider a very subtle craving many of us come to see in the face of life's eventual outcomes. We see clearly that the mental images we created in our minds of a specific future and future best self differ markedly from the outcomes. When our hold on such specific projections is strong, we can easily get lost in planning, expecting and demanding that the world acquiesce. And, as an additional point of suffering, the comparing mind arises to judge the present moment with the idealized moments of an unknowable future. Letting go of expectations of a specific future and future self is really in service to what is true now. It lets us realize the true self that is already here, a self that can flourish with whatever arises, and whenever it arises.

Letting Go - Attachments and Interdependence

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““A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.””

— Albert Einstein

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Previously we looked at our relationship to the impermanence of the physical world. Most of us don’t like that everything comes and goes. Our discomfort leads us to attach or cling to external and internal objects believing they will steady the unsteady nature of experience. However, we suffer when we find out that our attachments also come and go. So, letting go in this case is about releasing our attachments and reclaiming the sense of our universality. Each of us are an integral expression of the ever changing being-ness.

We can also see attachments as we look at our relationship with the interdependence of all things. Simply put, this means that nothing exists independently of anything else. A wooden table is not separate from all the things that helped the tree to grow, the people who harvested the tree, the designer that imagined its use, the craftsman who fashioned the table, the shops that sells the table, the people who buy it, the people who will dispose of it, and the earth that will welcome it back. The table is one expression of the interdependence.

We, too, are a part of a broad and expansive universe of possibilities and changes. However, very early in our development we start to deduce (erroneously) that we are, in fact, separate from everything else. This might begin as we realize we are not our parents, we are not our crib, and so on. We feel we are not part any of the objects we perceive and that they are separate in and of themselves. One side effect of believing in our own separateness is a sense of isolation. So, again we attach to things to alleviate our isolated, alone feelings. We create an feeling of ownership of things we grasp and call them “ours” and “mine. Letting go here is also about releasing our attachments and assumed ownership of experience and reawakening to the fact we are far from separate. We are really among the limitless possibilities with everything and everyone.

Letting Go - Attachments and Impermanence

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“If you take a handful of salt and pour it into a small bowl of water, the water in the bowl will be too salty to drink. But if you pour the same amount of salt into a large river, people will still be able to drink the river's water.

If your heart is small, one unjust word or act will make you suffer. But if your heart is large, if you have understanding and compassion, that word or deed will not have the power to make you suffer.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

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When you first approach Buddhism, there is the clear message of hope found in the Four Noble Truths -- 

• yes, there is suffering in life, and 

• there is a known cause of it, but 

• it is possible to end it, and 

• there is a path to follow free yourself from it. 

From the Second Noble Truth we learn that the principal cause of suffering is "clinging" to things in life - almost anything - objects, people, thoughts and beliefs. Letting go then means learning to loosen our grip on all those things we are holding so dearly. 

The primary way we can loosen or let go of our clinging is by willingly and courageously investigating all the ways we actually do cling and see how they serve a liberated and peaceful life or not. Just pausing with words like desire, attachment, striving, wanting, craving, grasping, searching, and needing can start to illuminate the pretty vast world where clinging often occurs.

It's also important to understand that clinging is in direct opposition to the impermanent reality of existence -- nothing lasts forever, everything is always changing, and every moment is new and different than the last. Yet, we get stuck in hoping things won't change and try to control the ever changing landscape of life. So, we suffer.

Letting Go - Attachments - Truth of the Way Things Are

““Letting go is more a process of seeing differently than you have before. Of seeing farther. And wider. It is making room beside your old habitual perceptions, beliefs, and experiences, the ones that may — or may not — have served. But in any case, they no longer comprise the entirety of what you can imagine. Your horizon is larger than that. There is room for more.

It takes courage to simply look, not for what might have been or what will be, but at the truth — and the beauty — of what is.”

Lea Gibson Page, On Being Contributor”

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You may know that the autumnal equinox is Saturday, September 22.. So, in the seasonal moment when we naturally relinquish the summer and welcome fall, I thought an exploration of the idea of "letting go" would be a good topic of inquiry.

In Buddhism, letting go is most often understood as the necessary releasing of our attachments to people, places and things. The release is necessary because the suffering in life comes directly from our clinging to how we want things to be versus how things really are. Importantly, this understanding of clinging and attachment is also directly parallel to the expansive understanding of our True Self versus the Separate Self we most often believe ourselves to be. As the quote above suggests, it is all about "seeing differently that you have before. Of seeing farther. And wider."  One of my early teachers talked about this expansive view as our being able to see that "we are not merely human -- we are ultimately an expression of the universal." 

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 9)

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““Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.” Pema Chodron

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An important exploration we can do concerns both the Separate Self (that we believe ourselves to be) and the True Self (that is open awareness itself). When looking for the Separate Self, we see it is really something that we have constructed from our societal conditioning and our own conclusions about experience. And, we find that a Separate Self actually cannot be found. The True Self, pure awareness, on the other hand, is known as the space-like field in which all our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions come and go without resistance.

By setting a sincere intention of knowing the truth of things as they actually are, we can begin seeing how the natural flow of awareness transcends the limitations of our perceived separateness and also how it pervades the activities of mind and body with a broader sense of knowing. Being fully human in wisdom and compassion is the work and joy of our "everyday lives."

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 8)

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““It isn’t the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”

Pema Chodron”

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We have been investigating two different views of the Self by making a distinction between our True Self and the Separate or Egoic Self.  We defined True Self as our personal expression of the eternal and infinite Awareness in which all experience appears and is known. This view of a Universal Consciousness, of which we are each a part, can open us to a realization that we are "more than merely human."

However, this True Self is not the Self with which we are most strongly identified. Instead, most of us identify with a Separate Self where we believe ourselves to be the main character in the story of our lives and are separate and distinct from all other objects of experience. We believe that our day-to-day experiences are caused by outside forces or obstacles.

This view can cause us to suffer because we don't see that it is actually us that has given the limited and finite meaning to our experience. These limitations don't let us know our True Self. This is why most contemplative traditions ask us to Investigate and let go of those limiting habits of mind. As we are able to open to the field of open awareness where all potentialities and possibilities can arise, the separate "I" that suffers can surrender its limitations and rest in the full potential of being where we are more fully aware and more fully human. 

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 7)

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““The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the ‘I’ out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate ‘I’ or mind can be found.”

Alan Watts
Excerpted from ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

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The low levels, or not so low levels, of anxiety that accompany our everyday life appear when "we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the 'I' out of the experience." Why is that the case? Recently I realized how automatically I have an opinion or commentary, or a story about any experience that appears. It became clear that when my thinking mind gets busy talking about an experience, I have already stepped out of that direct experience. So, are we "trying to get the "I" out of the experience" because the intimate connection with it is too much to "feel" directly?  This is an interesting area for reflection. If experience, that can only ever happen "now," is all that is real, how does our practice support finding and abiding in awake presence across all experience as it appears in our awareness? 

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 6)

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“When you completely accept this moment, when you no longer argue with what is, the compulsion to think lessens and is replaced by an alert stillness. You are fully conscious, yet the mind is not labeling this moment in any way... It is a shift from identification with form —the thought or the emotion— to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form — spacious awareness.”

— Eckhart Tolle

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When thoughts and emotions are energized, they arise as resistance to the way things actually are unfolding. We experience things through a filter of "I like that" or "I don't like that." This filter is created when we believe we are a separate and limited self, which triggers strategies of denial and avoidance as we try to stop or change or deny reality.  But, as we expand our view and identify with our open, aware essential being, we see that emotions are a kind of echo of the separate limited self view.

So, as a way of understanding and investigating our emotions, it's important to understand that we should not resist them with will power or discipline. By avoiding our emotions, or getting rid of them, or suppressing them, we actually keep them alive. Feelings cannot stand being clearly seen for what they are. 'When we are willing to investigate them in the open space of awareness, where all experience is allowed, we can better see the whole universe of experience in which any emotion is a passing part. From that open view and with more clarity we can respond with wisdom not just reactivity.

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 5)

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“I would define the ego as a concept originating from the “I am” experience, pure being without attributes, the absolute certitude we have that we exist.

When I conceptualize this experience, I name it “I” or “I am”.

There is nothing wrong with the pure concept “I am”. The ego comes in the moment I say “I am this or that”. The “this or that” superimposes a limitation onto something that, up until now, was limitless.

Francis Lucille”

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As the quote above suggests, when we allow ourselves only to objectify experience into me and you, us and them, seeing ourselves as being separate and distinct from everything else, we create a limitation that masks the eternal and infinite nature of true being. The solution can be as simple, and as challenging, as returning to our essential awareness and remembering that I AM is ever present and without limits.  Pema Chodron's captured this space of open awareness well when she wrote “You are the sky. Everything else — it’s just the weather.” This has particular importance as we grow in our understanding of emotions.

Awareness and Our Emotions (Part 4)

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“Inner peace begins the moment you choose not to allow another person or event to control your emotions.”

Pema Chodron”

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We've been talking about a couple of ways of investigating our emotions and the impact they have on our peace of mind and balance in life.  

On the one hand we can look for the "I" on whose behalf emotions arise. If we take a feeling like sadness, for example, we begin by wondering "Who or what is hurt or upset when I'm feeling sad?" We look to Awareness first and find that it is simply aware of thoughts, emotions, sensations and perceptions as they arise. It is empty of an objective "I" that is hurt or upset. We look to thoughts and sensations and find they they themselves cannot be hurt or upset, so again we find no objective "I" that is hurt or upset. Naturally, then, when this "phantom" self is seen for what it is, the emotions that arise on its behalf have no real function and can dissipate on their own.

On the other hand we can look directly at the emotions themselves as they appear. We quickly notice that they are made of thoughts and sensations that are"velcro-ed" together. The thoughts take the form of the story of "I am sad or upset because of . . . " If we unhook the story from the sensations and remove it or set it aside, just the physical sensations remain. Then, remembering that sensations come and go and since they are no longer supporting a story of hurt or upset, they dissipate naturally. And, what of the story that was created?  Returning to the story, we see it is a network of thoughts, beliefs, opinions and assumptions that also come and go.  When untethered from the physical sensations and unpacked from each other they also dissipate naturally. 

The good news is that there is an "I" that is always present, just covered over when emotions are present -- that "I" is our Awareness and Knowing of experience  -- it is the "I" that is our True Being - Our essential Self. We can rest in the awareness.