What is the role of attachment or detachment in householder life?

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Transcript

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In grahastha ashram what is the role of attachment or detachment is it that we show affection for them but we don’t ask them to become attached yeah definitely the bhagavad-gita is often best understood by looking at the broader whole of which is a part say it is a part of the mahabharata and specifically in the 13th chapter krishna says that don’t be attached to children the people in knowledge 13 8 to 12 he talks about the characters of knowledge and then he says that don’t be attached to sons or children or wives putra he uses first and wife he uses later now after that in the kurukshetra war when abhimanyu dies there’s a whole chapter where arjuna breaks down and he cries and it’s a very heart-wrenching description of his distress and after that in krishna’s speech krishna doesn’t speak for one word what hey have you forgotten the bhagavad-gita why are you so attached to your son now be detached krishna consoles him over there and reminds him of repeating yeah arjuna goes through various emotions and eventually he says that eventually he tells him i mean arjuna gets angry with his brothers so all of you you couldn’t protect my son are all your weapons like bangles and so so at that time krishna speaks to him that arjuna wise people in times of distress act to decrease the distress not increase it since your brothers are as distressed by what has happened as you are don’t speak words that will increase their distress and he in this way calls to his higher self he doesn’t at all talk anything about attachment over there so now you could say that this is simply strategic or we could also say that this is also the way in which the philosophy is operationalized so basically we all so i prefer that there is attachment detachment and i prefer focus on commitment so in our various roles that we are doing here we need commitment if we go too much in the zone of either attachment or detachment we may not be able to do that role properly so if i consider my role as a speaker or a teacher if i’m attached then if i give a talk and nobody appreciates the talk after that nobody then i’ll go to the point of giving the talk but if i’m detached then i might just speak in a way that i don’t care for the audience then i don’t try to make the make it relevant so but i need to be committed committed means this is my service and i’ll do it as well as i can do and a part of doing it as well as i can is to make it relevant to and one sign of relevance is that people reciprocate after the class they appreciate but getting that appreciation is not the sole purpose of giving the class so it’s best to focus on commitment like you said duty you could say that another word is commitment now now within commitment each of us has our own natures but some people are just more emotional some people are more rational so often those who they don’t show emotions that much on the other hand those who are emotional for them to not show emotions is very difficult so external perspective it might appear that a rational person is more detached and emotional person is more attached but it may not be like that so now again gender stereotypes always have limitations but women tend to be more emotional than rational and to be more tend to be more rational and emotional now is it that women are more attached than men you can’t make a generalized statement like that at one level women have the have been given the responsibility of bearing children and before a child starts speaking it’s the woman the mother has to bond with the child primarily at an emotional level and that is what is required by nature so an excessively rational approach especially for a toward an infant will become an obstacle in childbearing in child taking care of children you know just in a sense till maybe the child develops thinking speaking ability speaking ability the child is right always right the child wakes up at midnight and starts crying and says i’m hungry can’t say this is not go to sleep now eat later you can tell a 10 year old child you should have eaten properly earlier and you can eat the next morning you can’t do that so in a sense and now so what would be attachment for a mother and what we attachment for a father if you just judge it based on actions it could be it could be misleading a mother might seem much more attached oh you’re doing all this you’re taking care of hugging the child the father might say i’m detached but the important thing is not whether you’re attached or detached the important thing is how much you’re committed now this commitment the best way to see it is again in relationship with the whole that is this this soul yes is a part of god it’s a part of the whole and has been entrusted in my care therefore my life is meant to serve the whole and because this part of the whole is also in specifically my care so i’ll take care when we have that attitude that we see our relationships also as a service to krishna then we do the best that we can but at the same time we don’t get too obsessed with it so the way i differentiate between attachment and commitment when commitment is emotional investment hmm whereas attachment is emotional bondage when we invest money somewhere yes it’s invested but when i want i can disinvest it but if i have taken a bond then a money is there i just can’t get it out so we need to be able to sometimes the people whom we love very much sometimes they may just do something which is wrong and then if we get we are too emotionally bound to them then we just we become hyper sometimes they’re doing something wrong and they’re not agitated but we are agitated by it and then our whole life gets disrupted by that so no okay i have certain control over this person i’m trying the best that i can to get them on the right track but they don’t come it’s they are sold for ultimately parts of krishna and between them and krishna so sometimes so we need enough emotional investment to care for the other person so that that our whole life comes crumbling down so it again comes down to identity that my identity if my primary identity is that i identify myself primarily as a parent then if my child starts going on the wrong track i feel my whole life is a failure if i primarily identify myself as a as a engineer as a professor as an engineer if i lose if i’m software engineer i lose my job i feel then what is my identity if my whole world comes crumbling down if i identify myself as a professor and and say students don’t appreciate my subject or my students fail they do terribly then again i might just become devastated by that so if i identify myself primarily as a soul who is a part of the divine who is meant to serve krishna and all these are roles being a parent is a role being a software engineer is a role being a professor is a role now while i’m doing these roles i have to do them well but i don’t have to get so consumed by those roles that my world gets reduced to one particular role alone the example which i conclude this is gange vau ghamu dhanimati and the kunti maharani says in the bhagavatam that just as the ganga flows toward the ocean let my consciousness always flow towards you so now the river when the river is flowing toward the ocean there might be multiple channels through which the river is flowing now all the channels are important and the river flows forcefully through all the channels but if a particular channel gets blocked then the river keeps trying to flow from there but it doesn’t reduce all its flow to that channel only and i have to get through this okay this is not going let the other channels keep moving so attachment would be that we reduce our whole life to one particular role and one particular goal within that role so all the water has to flow only but detachment would mean that oh there’s a blockage over there just forget it see that is also not not proper because commitment means i’ll keep trying over here so detachment is not a detachment is not a rationalization for responsibility especially in today’s world it’s a very big possibility because we are living a commitment averse culture many times so so often i say that aversion to commitment is not detachment so how it is that see detachment is where i have something higher to do so this doesn’t matter for me detachment if you want to specifically talk about detachment okay these worldly things are there but i have found something higher that is detachment whereas aversion to commitment is what how all these things are enjoyable but if i choose one then other doors will close for me i want to keep all the doors open for me so that is aversion to commitment and that is not that is not at all spiritually conducive so if you focus on commitment then it’s a it’s possible to be both both responsible at the same to do basically becoming emotionally invested without becoming emotionally locked okay thank you so the question is