Attaching and Detaching are a common lesson in life and they have been happening to you ever since you appeared on this planet. Unfortunately for many people in our world today who are still caught up in deep states of unconsciousness, they are ruled by their attachments, including by the biggest attachment of all, their physical body.
If you are outside of the norm and have taken a substantial amount of time to observe and study yourself, you would have noticed that deep down at your fundamental nature you are beyond attachments/detachments, including your physical self.
The tricky part is that if you only have lived how society lives life, then you have not spend hours dis-identifying from what you are not and seeing the truth of who you are, and therefore your whole identity is based on your attachments.
A good way of viewing this is in the form of lego’s. Think of yourself like a lego base piece (the flat piece that you can build stuff on) and the lego’s are the attachments that you place on top of the base piece. It’s quite remarkable of all the things that you can attach on the base piece (to you), but the problem is that once an attachment is made, a link forms and the attached piece and the base become one. It’s obviously easy for you to see that there are two pieces when your looking from the higher perspective, but when your not, it’s very easy to get lost and think that both pieces are now one.
Now take a look at your life and see that there are many attached pieces that you have placed on your base and have gotten lost in them. They create all types of suffering for you, but since you think they are you, then how can you get rid of them? Another dangerous part of this is that there have been many pieces that were placed on you by others during your upbringing and are still attached to you currently. Since you have never spend any time really investigating what you are fundamentally, you don’t know what is you, and what are your attachments.
Some examples could be…
You are shy, your a good person, your a bad person, your scared of this, you don’t like this, your dumb, your smart, your ugly, and on and on it goes.
We naturally detached from somethings as well, but this detachment is mostly all unconscious and way more limited then your attachments. This is why it’s so crucial that you start learning to detach and attach consciously, as once this is learned you ultimately have more power over your life.
I used to think I was a shy, artistic, tennis player, and I would carry those attachments everywhere with me as if they were me, now I am what I want to attach to at this moment and if that no longer serves me then I can be something completely different.
The most powerful detachment that you can make while your still alive is to the physical body, once you can learn how to do that then not even death will hold much power over you.