Attachment And Detachment By: Kishor Kulkarni

Have you observed a balloon seller?. He inflates a few balloons, ties a thread around each one and wraps those threads around his fingers. When someone comes to buy a balloon, he removes one from one of his fingers and gives it away. Then he inflates another balloon and ties it to his finger again.

Our mind is like the balloon seller. Myriad different objects in the world entice us like balloons and our desires are like the threads that keep our mind attached to the objects.  The moment one desired object is acquired, it gets detached from our mind. But our mind immediately inflates another one and promptly gets attached to it!

Now, when does the balloon seller stop this repeated activity of detaching and reattaching balloons to his fingers? Possibly, at the end of his work day when he thinks he must go home now. Then he disposes off his last balloon and does not inflate any more balloons. So, now he becomes detached from the balloons, but only temporarily. Again, the next morning, he is out to repeat the cycle of inflating, attaching and detaching balloons. Likewise, we also take a temporary respite when our life ends, but only to restart the repetitive cycle of desires all over again in the next life.

Is there a final end to this cycle? When the balloon seller becomes old, he may finally decide that he can no longer continue going out and selling balloons. So, he will then hang up his boots and be free from the repetitive inflate-attach-detach cycle. Similarly, we have to develop a lasting vairagya bhav – cultivate a strong determination -- that makes us lose all interest in worldly pursuits driven otherwise by unending desires. That is when we will be released from the repetitive cycle of birth and death.

It is said that a sincere spiritual seeker should cultivate true detachment. So then, he would tell himself that he should reduce his attachment, for example, to smoking. He may manage it with considerable effort after some time. But that is only one attachment gone and we tend to have so many of them! We can imagine the plight of someone trying to detach himself from good food, sports, entertainment, hobbies, spouse, children, grand children, friends and so on. It is like the balloon seller having too many balloons tied around his fingers and their threads getting entangled with each other, complicating the process of detachment.

How does one manage to get detached from the whole of samsara without having to go on trying infinitely to painfully detach from many objects one by one? As we can see, there are so many different objects at the far end of our attachments. Trying to get rid of those objects one by one is indeed extremely difficult. However, at the near end, there is just a single entity involved in all these attachments. That single entity is your limited bodily identity or ego. That is the driver behind the various attachments forming. So, if this single entity is removed, all the many objects at the far end will be instantly detached.  Thus, it should be relatively easier to detach yourself from samsara if you can manage to get rid of your ego.

It is by our Sadguru’s grace that we can manage to rid ourselves of our ego and develop a durable vairagya bhav that alone can lead us to moksha or liberation.