The power and the demise of attachment.

 Subject: The power and the demise of attachment.





Is the value of a politician found, not in his rhetoric but in his background and upbringing. Do any of us learn to move away from entrenched views formed in our youth, even when subsequent experience tends to tell us a different story. Are we simply Pavlovian creatures moving through a field of nostalgic thoughts. Is free will a myth closeted as we are by preferences formed when growing up and are mothers largely to blame for our proclivity and bias.

This sea mist we call our mental understanding is founded on marshy ground, it ebbs and flows with the proverbial weather, seeking surety where non exists. If we thought less of what we know and acknowledged more of what we don’t know, if our minds were instead filled with conjecture and mystery rather than our trying to nail our colours to the mast of a ship which is sailing in the wrong direction with a captain and a faulty compass.

The books on my shelves have encourage me to think this way or that way but in essence it doesn’t matter, I am but the flotsam floating on the tide, my mark is either high or low, ever changing because in this noisy world we have to create a purpose in our lives to make sense of how to cope with time, that period between birth and death. It’s as if we had been in a coma, reacting to stimuli, living on impulses, some good, some bad but always external and driven by events.

Even a thoughtful, driven brain, is adrift amidst the fashion of our time, the incessant prodding of the media, the cataclysm on a distant shore is the life blood of an active mind but is not of our own making. Even the monastic mind is driven by thoughts of god and the reward in heaven.

The Buddhist concept, of living a solitary life so as to be able to achieve peace and through peace gain understanding, minimising the suffering, and releasing oneself  from the desire of attachment, corralling the mind in some sort of containment, lending to structured thought and a measure of passive reflection.