How do I deal with attachment?

How do I deal with attachment?

The first thing to be understood is that if love becomes an attachment, you were just in an illusion that it was love. You were just fooling yourself and thinking that this was love. Really, you were in need of attachment. And if you go still deeper, you will find that you were also in need of becoming a slave. There is a subtle fear of freedom, and everyone wants to be a slave. Everyone, of course, talks about freedom, but no one has the courage to be really free because when you are really free you are alone. If you have the courage to be alone, then only can you be free. But no one is courageous enough to be alone. You need someone. Why do you need someone? You are afraid of your own loneliness. You become bored with yourself. And really, when you are lonely nothing seems meaningful. With someone you are occupied, and you create artificial meanings around you. You cannot live for yourself, so you start to live for someone else. And the same is the case with the someone else also- he or she cannot live alone, so he is in search to find someone. Two persons who are afraid of their own loneliness come together and they start a play – a play of love. But deep down they are searching for attachment, commitment, bondage.

Remember this. It is one of the paradoxes of the mind: Whatsoever you get you will get bored with, and whatsoever you do not get you will long for. When you are alone you will long for some slavery, some bondage. When you are in bondage you will begin to long for freedom. Really, only slaves long for freedom – and free people try again to be slaves. The mind goes on like a pendulum, moving from one extreme to another.

Attachment is one of the ugliest things. And when I say ugliest, I do not mean only religiously, I mean aesthetically, also. When you are attached, you have lost your aloneness; you have lost everything. Just to feel good that someone needs you and someone is with you, you have lost everything – you have lost yourself. But the trick is that you try to be independent and you make the other a possession – and the other is doing the same. So do not possess if you do not want to be possessed.

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