People think spirituality means you should drop your wife or husband, or something. It must be understood that your deepest sense of attachment is not to your money, house, wife or child. Your deepest sense of attachment is to your own thought and to your own emotion. The biggest attachment is your personality — your ideologies, philosophies, likes, dislikes, and your emotions. This is the real accumulation. And this is what you need to throw; not your wife, child, bank balance or something else.
You may feel, “No, my wife, job and child are dear to me.” But, please see, when your wife, child or the situations around you really go against the way you think and feel, you will drop all of them. You will not drop your ways of thinking and feeling, but you will drop the other person because the other person has stopped fitting into your life. They are in your life only because they have made the compromise to agree with whatever you think and feel.
So, you do not have to work on your attachments with people around you, you really need to work with your attachment to your own body. Only because you are deeply attached to your body, you get attached to somebody. If you release yourself from this, you are free from everything. If you are not attached to your own body, you can be deeply involved but unattached. Teachings that say “Do not get attached” are not going to work. Unless experientially it is clearly within you that this body is not me, there is no way you can become unattached from the body.
There is a nice story about this. Once Indra, the king of all gods, came to earth seeking pleasure. He chose the form of a pig because generally, in terms of physical pleasure, the form of a pig is considered best. He found himself a beautiful female pig, married her and produced dozens of piglets with her. Over time, he got very deeply involved and attached to them.
The gods waited patiently in heaven thinking it was a short pleasure trip but when Indra did not return for a long time, they came down and saw this whole pig-business in progress. The gods then decided to kill one piglet hoping that the tragedy would make Indra realise his true nature and return. But for every piglet killed, Indra clung to the remaining ones harder. Eventually, the gods killed all the piglets.
Then the gods thought that Indra’s real attachment was his wife so they killed her. Now he was greatly distressed. Soon his pig friends and relatives suggested he take another wife and the whole pig-business started again.
The gods were now completely at a loss with this and Narada, the wise sage who was passing by and happened to see all this, said: “Why did you kill his wife and kids? His attachment is to his body. Destroy the body”. So, the gods cut his body into two halves and Indra came out and returned to heaven.
So the bondage with the body is deep. That is the source of all attachments. If you can truly get attached to another being, it is truly wonderful and fantastic but when you get attached to your own body you become so limited. So, you do not have to go on searching for non-attachment somewhere else or distancing this and that in your life. You simply need to know how to distance yourself from your own body. Yoga is a whole complete science, a tool and technology to bring about this sense of separation and freedom from the accumulation of the body.
The writer is a world-renowned spiritual leader
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