Page 10 - NAMAH-Oct-2017

Editorial

Apropos human attachment

One of the hallmarks of humanity is the “The many’s voices fill the listening ear,
phenomenon of human bondage and Distract the head:
attachment. Indeed it is that which has The One is silence; on the snows we hear
given a meaning to collective existence, Silence tread (1).”
consolidated the family, welded friendship,
ushered humanism and deepened our Centuries after, the post-modernist voice
emotional repertoire to a level that had also expressed a poignant concern with
never been achieved by a non-human species. attachment, though for a different reason. Any
attachment was fatalistic and meaningless as
Yet it is the very phenomenon of attachment ultimately death was inevitable and the Great
that has brought endless misery, fostered Void was the only reality. Foucault extols,
the bitterest enmity and perpetrated abject “To be attracted is not to be beckoned by the
jealousy and horrendous revenge. It is no allure of the exterior, rather, it is to suffer — in
wonder then that the greatest volume of emptiness and destitution — the presence of
violence against the person occurs among the outside and, tied to that presence, the fact
first-degree relatives. Rightly, the proverb that one is irremediably outside the outside.
exists: ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’. ...The outside cannot offer itself as a positive
presence....but only an absence that pulls as far
The masses had their most memorable away as possible.... Attraction, the marvellous
moments as well as their most poignant simplicity of opening, has nothing to offer but
miseries in the matrix of attachment. The the infinite void...One is attracted precisely to
poets and storytellers had therefore no dearth the extent that one is neglected (2).”
of subjects and the counsellors, formal and
informal, no dearth of clients. An alternate movement

The seekers of spirituality took a different If the surface personality as studied by
recourse. To avoid the pitfalls of human conventional psychology or what is known
bondage and attachment, they sought the as the outer being in yoga psychology is
monastic life, the abbey, the hermitage, the considered to be the only poise of personality,
ashram. There were world-shunning hermits then Foucault’s speculation has a relevance
who preferred sheer isolation, free from the worth considering. If what the spiritual
security of the hermitage, in the loneliness tradition holds true that the outer being is
of intractable terrains. The Rishi of the Pole false and illusory and only the void exists,
justifies his sojourn with solitude: then also a contention somewhat similar to

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