Greetings beloved being of love and light. I have noticed that many people are struggling with the notion of loving others without attaching to them. So today, we will go into depth about what attachment is, and how it links to love.
Attachment is based on a fixed idea. You have a fixed idea of what someone is to be like, or what a situation is to be like, or what an object is to be like. This fixed idea can be something that is currently a reality, or something that you hope to be a reality in the future. However, having a fixed idea in an ever-changing world is already a silly thing to do from the outset. You are already setting yourself up to experience suffering. Even if your fixed idea or expectation is met at some point, things will eventually change, and when they do, because you are attached to the fixed idea, you will resist this change, and this resistance leads to anger.
Having attachments creates this desire within you to control life so that it meets your ego’s fixed ideas. This ego desire to control life creates so much suffering within you. Instead of surrendering, accepting and going with the flow of life, you are always tense and angry when things don’t go your ego’s way. Your ego cannot control life; life flows according to the Divine’s will. But this never seems to stop your ego from trying. And whenever you allow your ego to try to control life, you are preventing yourself from being at the vibration of love. You cannot truly love someone if you try to control them, and you cannot truly love life if you want to control it. True unconditional love and freedom are two sides of the same coin. When you truly love someone, you allow them to live their life exactly as they want to with no desire to control them. And whenever you love life, you allow it to unfold exactly as it wants to with no desire to change it. Otherwise, any love you feel will be conditional, and therefore it wouldn’t be true love.
The ego cannot love without attachment. Any time you feel love, the ego will do what it can to make sure that love doesn’t go away. So if someone triggers a feeling of love within you, the ego will attach to that person to try to ensure that they are in a close relationship with you so that you feel love all the time. It seems logical. But life is illogical. The moment you attach to someone, the love dwindles. Instead of allowing them to do what they want with their life, you try to keep them close to you. And anytime that they don’t trigger that feeling of love within you, you will be frustrated or upset, and may take it out on them. This way of trying to control others actually pushes you away from them. This is because everyone is naturally resistant to any form of control. We have all experienced times when parents or teachers or employers try to control us, and in those moments where they try to control you, do you feel love from them? Of course not. You cannot control someone and love them at the same time.
Let’s use a very common example of how a mother attaches to her child (let’s say the child is male in this example). She feels love for her son. However, because she relies on her son to feel that love, she resists her son eventually leaving home because that’ll mean she won’t feel that same feeling of love as often. And if the son tries to live his own life, the mother may call him regularly and ask him to visit all the time, because if he doesn’t, she will hardly ever feel that love. And if the son dies, the mother will be in constant grief because now she believes that she can never feel that same love again. Because the mother is relying on her son to feel love, this creates an attachment to her son. And this attachment motivates her to control her son so that he is always in close, regular contact with her. But, of course, what often happens is that the son wants to go and live his own life elsewhere. As a result, the mother is always frustrated, and the son is frustrated because of his mother’s constant attempts to control him. Does this sound like love to you?
In a way, whenever someone or something triggers the feeling of love within you, immediately your ego tries to possess them. By possessing that thing or person, the ego believes it can feel that love all the time. But the moment your ego tries to possess something or someone, that love you initially felt turns into something ugly. This can be seen in the simple example of seeing a beautiful flower. Because the beautiful flower helped trigger the feeling of love within you, your ego may decide to pick the flower so it is with you in your home. But the moment you pick a flower, the flower starts dying. Instead of loving the flower to allow it to continue to grow where it wanted to grow so that others could benefit from its beauty, you took it as your possession. We don’t just do this with flowers though; we do it to every thing or person that helps trigger love within us. We attach to them and try to make them ours, and so we control them and don’t allow them the freedom to do what they want to do.
Let’s say you fall in love with someone. Instantly, your ego wishes to make that person its property. Instead of just allowing that person to go about their life as they want to, your ego is so fixed on this idea of being a couple with that person. Because of this attachment, your ego tries to do what it can to make that other person its partner. And your ego will be angry if the other person doesn’t want a relationship with you, or if they don’t love you back. But if you truly loved someone, you’ll love them whether they love you back or not, and whether they want a relationship with you or not. Even if you do enter into a relationship with that person, when that other person inevitably wants to go on their separate path, your ego will resist it and will be angry. However, if you truly love someone, you just want them to be happy, and if that means them no longer being in a relationship with you, you happily accept.
By trying to control others because of your attachment, you are not unconditionally loving them. You are not loving them no matter what they choose to do. Surely if you truly loved someone, you’d encourage them to follow their heart and joy no matter what, even if that means they’d be away from you. Instead of valuing their happiness, you prefer to value your fixed idea of them. Instead of acknowledging that the highest outcome for all is always enacted, your ego tries to change life because it thinks it knows better than the Divine as to how life should go. Respect another person’s freedom, and you are on your way to truly loving them.
Attachment causes the fear of losing what/who you’re attached to. And you cannot love and fear at the same time. You know how attached to something or someone you are by how resistant you are to that thing or person changing or no longer being in your life. Attachment leads to selfishness, but love leads to selflessness. For instance, if you are attached to a material possession, you’d be unwilling to just give that possession away to someone who needs/wants it. But if you are not attached to that material possession, you would gladly give that material possession to someone who needs/wants it. Everyone is always trying to possess things and draw boundaries around their possessions to make it clear that ‘this is mine and not yours’. But in truth, nothing is ever “yours” because “you” do not really exist. Yes there is the body, the mind, and oneness/love, but there is no individual “you”. And without a “me”, there is no “mine”. And without this concept of “mine”, there can be no attachment.
Your partner is not really “yours”. Your children are not really “yours”. These are all independent people who you are temporarily experiencing a relationship with. Your house is not really “yours”; you are temporarily living in it until the next person. Your job is not really “yours”; you just have that job until someone eventually replaces you. Your body is not really “yours”; it is made up of the materials of Earth, and will return to the Earth upon its physical death. Nothing is “yours”. No part of existence is owned by “you”. All of life is a sharing of love between different aspects and manifestations of The One. It is your illusory ego that wants to claim things as its own because that makes your ego seem more real. When you don’t view anything as your property, the idea of “you” starts to fade away.
With more meditation, you will gradually peel off the layers of disguise of what makes up “you” until there are no more layers left, at which point you will realise that this idea of a “you” was just an illusion. Upon that realisation, when you remember the truth that only love exists, then you will no longer attach to anything or anyone. Because you will have found permanent, unconditional inner love, happiness and joy, you will no longer be relying on outside sources to feel those things. And when you no longer need outside sources to feel love, happiness and joy, there will be no need to attach to, or possess and control, anything or anyone. It all comes back to remembering the universal truth. At that point, you will no longer love with conditions or attachments. You will love because you will not be able to do anything but to share the love you have found from within yourself.
By recognising that all is one, you will realise that everything is an illusion, and so there is no “thing” or “others” to attach to; there is only awareness/love. You can only get attached to a fixed idea, but the illusion of life is constantly changing, that’s why something that is fixed can only be an “idea”. You wouldn’t attach to something that you consciously accept is changing all the time. For instance, you wouldn’t attach to the time of 2:30pm, because that would mean you will be unhappy for 23 hours and 59 minutes of the day. It seems ridiculous to attach to a fixed time because we consciously accept that time is constantly changing. But it is equally ridiculous to attach to anything or anyone as everything is always changing — you just need to consciously accept this. The only thing that is permanent is oneness/awareness/love, and this is not really a “thing” that you can attach to.
Remember: attachment leads to resistance and control. True love leads to acceptance and freedom.
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