A Self, A Seer
“Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are not elated by good fortune or depressed by bad. Such are seers.”
p. 111 in The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Volume 1: The End of Sorrow, by Eknath Easwaran
My program teaches us to let go of self-will, and to give our life over to the care of God as we understand God. Sometimes we feel that we need more direction in how to give one’s life over to God. These volumes where Easwaran breaks down the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text, gives such advice. A Buddhist monk once also explained the nature of attraction and aversion in a small video I watched. He suggested that when we are attracted to someone, we must not “pull” or the person will then swing away. We must not “push” when we dislike a person or thing, or it will swing back towards us and hit us in the face. This is the task of equilibrium in the universe. As we learn to not “pull” or “push”, we find that we are less in the self. We are giving our life over to God, and we are letting go of attachment. As we do this, we also find that we are less attached to elation or depression. We find balance, and we know more a sense of peace. True, the universe will challenge us again. We will be tempted into selfish acts of attachment, and we will have to let go of selfishness in order to employ a neutral stance while experiencing these triggers.
Ultimately, giving up self-will and the way of the self, is how we get closer to God. I have been pondering this for the last four years that I have been in recovery from addiction, and subscribing to my group where we read literature that attempts to aid us on our spiritual path. So what is it that I do that is selfish? What are these selfish attachments that Easwaran speaks of in this quote? This idea of selfish attachment and the self-will emerges in my recovery from addiction, so let’s start there. While in active addiction with my eating disorder, I become very selfishly attached to my body and body image, and I try to control how I look. In this my mind becomes warped and I am no longer able to see my body objectively. In active alcoholism, I begin to worship a substance, and those that get in the way of my drinking become obstacles that I must get around unabashedly. I no longer care about the world around me as I worship drinking, and I become careless in how I treat others as well as myself. In both cases, the addiction becomes God. These are selfish acts and behaviors if not selfish ways of life. I may also, in active addiction, learn to worship accomplishment, and my ego then becomes greatly out of balance. I may worship a life of doing rather than being, and become disconnected once again from a higher power or spiritual God. All of these examples show the nature of having immense selfish attachment to behaviors that are not healthy and are fueled by our addiction.
As I let go of selfish attachments in recovery, I learn to live my life for others. I have also let go of striving for accomplishment, specifically with my art, music, and writing. I have become more personal. I have redefined what it means to live with a mental illness disability. I am also in recovery from my addictions of an eating disorder, of which I have been in recovery now for over 25 years, and alcoholism, of which I have been in recovery for four years. I have become increasingly balanced, as I let go of attachment and addiction in my life. I still must balance my ego, and as I said earlier, circumstance continues to throw challenges into the cogs of the wheel of life. I believe the Christians refer to these as temptations. My program refers to them as character flaws, and Easwaran here refers to them as selfish attachments. I also have a mood disorder, and medication is a part of my recovery. I like what is said in this quote, because it implies that there is more that I can do on a daily basis. Becoming neutral is a goal. I don’t have to give up joy and happiness, and there are valid times to experience grief and despair. All of these experiences are natural and healing to some degree. It is healthy to move through these emotions with grace and not become attached or stuck. Letting go of self and selfishness is the key to doing so. We can just see. We can watch the game that is life, feel and let go, and not become overly attached to outcomes, goals, or realities. In this way, we fully accept God into our lives and become holy. We become “Seers”, we become objective, and we are able to help those around us who are still stuck in the selfish mud of their egos. This helping may even help us put further distance between us and a selfish life. We can see now, others and ourselves, and we can move into pure acceptance and gratitude for all that is.