Non attachment and Right Seeing
Nonattachment (vairagya), alas, has become just a word for most people. They are attached to a lot of things in life; and they are attached to words too – worldly (laukika) and spiritual (vaidika). Knowledge and scholarship make them proud.
In a significant advice1 in the Viveka-Cudamani (Crest Jewel of Discrimination), Sri Sankaracarya connects nonattachment with right seeing (samyag–darsana). “A man, drowning in the ocean of samsara, must lift himself up, by himself, through (first) attaining nonattachment2 and (then) establishing himself in right seeing,” says the master of non-dual Vedanta.
In his commentary on this eminent work, Sri Candrasekhara Bharati says ‘right seeing’ is the direct means to liberation while ‘nonattachment’ is the main cause (or means) leading to right seeing.
The higher we go, the lesser becomes the difference between the means and the end. When we examine the nature of pure nonattachment, we can see that it is impossible to have it without right seeing. We therefore wonder if right seeing leads to real nonattachment. Which is then the means and which the end?
No wonder teachers like J Krishnamurti have described ‘attention’ (going well with right seeing) as the beginning and the end. They would dismiss the division of means and end, and appeal to their friends to just live in attention. Any attachment is a reflection of old conditionings and therefore is the shadow of our past. The self (ego) and its preferences are both created out of memories. Attention is abidance in the present; its flame burns the dead. Alert living is the mani-karnika ghat of Varanasi , where the corpses of thought are continuously consigned to the tongues of ‘the fire of awareness’.
Traditionally we have always heard that viveka (discrimination between real and unreal) leads to vairagya. Here again, true discrimination demands ‘seeing things properly.’ If we look at objects, letting some old habits take us over, viveka is just not possible. If, on the other hand, we behold the glitter and glamour of this world with a quiet mind, free from past tendencies, hardly anything can take us for a ride.
Sweets or cars, music or dance, woman or wine – we may relate with them all with no bias: then the wonder of wonders happens. The machinery of thinking slows down and grinds to a halt. Thinking (drawing from the past all the time) had all along colored our vision, making us attached to certain things and averse to certain other. When thoughts do not govern us anymore, the quiet mind has a unique intelligence. Then we have a liberating vision, with love and compassion in our bosom. We seek nothing; nobody needs to fear us anymore.
Swami Chidananda
Varanasi
Friday, May 01, 2009
1 uddhared-atmanatmanam magnam samsara-varidhau
yogarudhatvam-asadya samyag-darsana-nisthaya – Verse 9
2 The verse actually says, “Having mounted the steed of yoga,” but it means, “Having attained a high degree of vairagya.” The justification can be found in Gita 6.4