What happens if you don’t turn out the way you think you should?
Reading today’s Spirituality & Health Newsletter about attachment and non-attachment gave me the thought that I generally relate attachment to material things, events, outcomes, and other people. I don’t often think of being attached to myself. I am not sure it is possible to be non-attached to self.
We are eternally attached to presence – the presence that has always existed and always will. I have always felt that I (as my eternal presence) came to this human existence to evolve, become, learn, grow, and leave being more than I was when I came here. I have my imaginary eye set on a picture of myself being fully integrated as I conceive that concept.
What happens if I don’t make it happen before I die? What happens if I am not the presence I think I should be at any given time? Do I detach from self and give up?
I know that many people try to detach from self by choosing to be unconscious and unaware. Even though life calls them time after time to pay attention to self, take care of self, be one with self, they insist instead on focusing on control of their external environment. They work hard to control other people, gain notoriety, and amass bundles of wealth. Their never-ending goal is continuing to be who they imagine they are and they will go to great lengths to maintain that illusion.
I set my presence aside as I was growing up because in my child’s wisdom I knew it was better to detach from self and survive than to stay attached to the self who was struggling to become and be abandoned and die. I required my parents’ love and acceptance to stay alive and I bought it with self-abandonment.
My eternal presence did not abandon me, but instead remained quietly attached to my soul and occasionally poked me to remind me that I was still alive and that childhood dependency would end. I began my quest to become who I truly am on my 18th birthday. Many, many things in my life have not turned out the way I imagined they would (or should). I discovered only within the past few years that staying attached to outcomes of anything outside of myself cost me dearly and were really serving only as distractions to keep me from paying attention to myself. I have no more right to determine how anything outside of me should be than anyone else.
But me . . . I have every right to determine how I will be in the world and that is to live fully as the presence I always have been and always will be. The wisdom of my life’s lessons is to step out of my own way and let go of the attachment to how I imagine I should be.
©2010 by Barbara L. Kass
Eternal Presence 