5. Bondage from Attachment

Krishnamurti said that attachment is conditioning. He said, attachment indicates one’s mental involvement with something, that is, liking for and dependence on something. It is a natural tendency of the human mind. One could be attached to several things such as property, money, power, importance in society, beliefs, goals, and so on. One’s country, religion, tradition are the object of attachment. Krishnamurti has significantly point out the fact that one’s conditioning is in reality constitute one’s attachment. To him, if there were no attachment there would be no conditioning. The object of attachment offers an individual the means of escape from one’s own emptiness. So attachment is escape, and it is escape that strengthens conditioning.

To further clarifies he said,

‘If I am attach to you, it is because you have becomes the means of escape from myself; therefore you are very important to me and I must possess you, hold on to you. You become the conditioning factor, and escape is the conditioning.’^[1]

If one could be aware of one’s escape he or she could then perceive the factors, the influences that make for conditioning.

So, to be aware of one’s conditioning it is possible only by understanding another process which is the process of attachment. If one could understand why an individual is attached, one can be aware of one’s conditioning. But by one’s own thoughts and actions an individual is bound and is not aware at all. One is only aware of the conflict, pleasure and pain. Supposing, one is attached to a table and from that attachment one gets pleasure, sense of possession and the utility of it, and feeling emanates that it is marvellous table so one must hold it. So, when a person is attached to another, in that attachment there is pride of possession, a sense of domination, fear of losing it, therefore jealousy and tendency of greater attachment, greater possessiveness.

One is tremendously attached to one’s nationality as a Hindu, and the others as German, French, Italian and English and so on.

‘Attachment gives great security, which is an illusion. It is an illusion to be attached to something because that something may go away. So, what one is attached to is the image, the ‘self’ that a person has built about that.’^[2]

Krishnamurti again said that, to cultivate detachment is another form of escape and isolation. It is another form of attachment to an abstraction and to an ideal called detachment. It only leads to further conflict.

He said,

‘When we are attached we know the pain of attachment, the anxiety of it, and we say–for god’s sake, I must detached myself from all this horror. So the battle of detachment begins the conflict.’^[3]

The ideal is fictitious and becoming the ideal is an escape from ‘what is.’ There is the understanding of ‘what is’ only when the mind is no longer seeking any escape. The mind, unwilling to be what it is and fearful of what it is, seeks these various escape and the way of escape is ‘thought.’ As life becomes more superficial, more mechanical more meaningless one attached to thinking and the whole process of thinking, and worships the things that ‘thought’ has put together. But as long as there is thinking, there must be escapes and attachments, which only strengthen conditioning. The following section therefore, discusses on how an individual could be free from those bondages and conditioning.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

Krishnamurti, J. (2006). ‘Commentaries on Living.’ (Second Series), New Delhi: Penguin Books, p. 6

[2]:

Krishnamurti, J. (2006). ‘On Freedom.’ Chennai: Krishnamurti Foundation India, p. 128

[3]:

Martin, Raymond. (Ed). (1997) ‘Krishnamurti: Reflections on the Self.’ Chicago: Open Court, p. 200