Attachment and Suffering

Dew evaporates,
And all this world is dew.
So dear, so fresh, so fleeting.

Zen poet Issa (1763-1828), on the death of his son

Dear All,

The fourth element in the first lojong slogan is about the inevitability of suffering.  We suffer when we lose that to which we are attached. 

Pema Chodren, in one of her approaches to the slogans, frames this quite pitilessly.  She makes it clearly about the egotism and self-referentiality of attachment:

Contemplate that as long as you are too focused on self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will suffer. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want does not result in happiness.

This is tonic, and puts the responsibility for suffering squarely on us.  "too focued" and "Obsessing" are the key terms.  Still, we have to learn the ways of attachment, or we have no human life.

Rather than mourn the inevitability of mourning, or try too fast to eliminate it, we could welcome and celebrate it as we prepare (over lifetimes perhaps) to release it.  "Now I know I have a heart," says the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, "because it's breaking."

That is, even if you have the goal or value of detachment, there is something precious and central about the very fruits of loss, which include insights about attachment and releasement, which include the awakening of love.  So Issa also wrote,
 This dewdrop world
is a dewdrop world
and yet, and yet...
 
all blessings to all,

Michael