Enlightenment of Detachment

It’s widely misunderstood when you hear about detachment. The majority take them as avoidance of suffering, recklessness, or abandonment of the world. It’s not that. What does detachment really mean is that you must orient yourself towards the higher good you can imagine and then having done that, act in the moment, that includes you must gracefully accept suffering, as well, as it enters, and let it go as it leaves, you become aware of self and surrounding. Even attachment to avoidance of sufferings creates its own suffering. In ancient Greek, there is a word for this - φυγόπονος, which means fear of pain that makes you avoid the pain. Pain is ultimately inevitable in most scenarios, however, suffering is optional. Your resolve might be tested along the way, through the fire, but don’t conflate what is expedient and comfortable with what is correct or perhaps the moral thing to do. Living in the moment without the higher goal is like slowly building yourself as the strongest enemy you could ever imagine. Every action has associated suffering, for example, a woman conceives and she will have to suffer the consequences of childbirth, you marry your love and your loved one will, for sure, die one day. If suffering seems so absolutely inevitable, does it necessarily stop you from orienting yourself towards the higher goal and living in this moment? It doesn’t because it’s always optional in nature. On the same note, people misunderstand attachment too, they say, in order to achieve enlightenment, one must renounce attachment whole because life is suffering and attachment makes it worse. It doesn’t, it only causes suffering when you can’t release things when it’s time to let them go.

Perhaps what you think suffering is for you was, in essence, a blessing from the beginning. Death, for example, people say it’s the end of life, so that must be terrifying. Perhaps it’s the ultimate silence, peace and calm you always yearned for. We exist as a dot on the timeline of this eternity, but our actions will have repercussions that would reverberate throughout time, the butterfly effect. We must thus decide to face suffering head-on and accept it as gracefully as possible. That’s detachment when ecstasy and suffering become one. In Finnish, there is a saying, "New snow is the death of the old snow". In order to move ahead, you must die to all you once loved and you must be willing to die, so that you may live and live abundantly.

- Prof. Jordan B. Peterson. Voice of sanity in the world of confusion. Thank you.