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Thread: Releasing Attachments, and Maintaining Standards

  1. #1
    Stegodon
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    Default Releasing Attachments, and Maintaining Standards

    How do you find the boundaries there? Between letting go (which seems to be one of the Major Tasks of adulthood) and letting it ALL go.

    It seems to me that most of us enter our 20's with a fine set of notions of how the world should be. And for some few, that agenda serves as an excellent blueprint for action. Without hope and foolish optimism, little would change.

    And yet it also seems to me that the vast majority of our ideas and notions just don't work. By the time we're in our 40's, we're in a process of letting go of most of them and learning that the world isn't obligated to meet our ideals, and in fact doesn't care.

    How do you distinguish between giving up prematurely and beating your head against the wall unnecessarily?

    Where and how do you let go?

  2. #2
    Elephant
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    Default Re: Releasing Attachments, and Maintaining Standards

    The balance between them pretty much points out - at least to me - the hopelessness of holding ourselves to impossible standards of perfection. I've been studying the I Ching for years and reading a lot of different things. Every time some idiot/philosopher/"master" points out that we should be this way or that way, that the Superior Man makes no errors, I want to choke them with an electrical cord.

    We "should".
    But we can't.

    The only thing we *need* to do is to allow ourselves to make mistakes and to let go of the impossible ideal of "perfection" and error free living. We're going to do things wrong. It is not possible not to. The right thing to do is to learn from it, not to punish ourselves for our failure.
    I reserve the right to be bothered by things that don't faze you,
    and to cheerfully ignore things that bug the shit out of you.
    I am not you.

  3. #3
    Stegodon
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    Default Re: Releasing Attachments, and Maintaining Standards

    Sliced that Gordian knot right in two, there, didn'tcha.

    Given, though, our general aversion to pain, it seems natural to WANT to avoid "mistakes". At least, the avoidable ones.

    Maybe that's why the inevitability of suffering is among the Dalai Lama's 4 noble truths. Perhaps the dichotomy isn't so much between attachments and releasing, as avoiding pain v. truly living.

  4. #4
    Why so serious? Tinker's avatar
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    Default Re: Releasing Attachments, and Maintaining Standards

    Obsession is the true enemy. Try to become aware of the thoughts that spin around in your head. I like to think of them as revving the engine without engaging the clutch, spending gas while gunning it in neutral. There are methods of meditation that are about taking your thoughts and being able to control them.

    Exercise, if you are out of shape you are more likely to hold onto things. One thing that helps is if you put your anger or fear or whatever negative emotion that has a hold of you and use the energy to lift the weight or spin the pedals or whatever. Basically turn the unproductive obsession into something productive and burn it off.
    "And I hope I don't get born again, 'cuz one time was enough!" -- Mark Sandman

  5. #5
    Elephant
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    Default Re: Releasing Attachments, and Maintaining Standards

    The paradox is that in attempting to release our attachments, we remain firmly attached to the illusory ideal of how things should be; that being that we are attached to the idea that we can somehow achieve that state of perfection and be able to do everything easily and smoothly without any pain if we just try hard enough and make ourself perfect enough.

    That is still "attachment".
    I reserve the right to be bothered by things that don't faze you,
    and to cheerfully ignore things that bug the shit out of you.
    I am not you.

  6. #6
    Elephant
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    Default Re: Releasing Attachments, and Maintaining Standards

    Taking my own advice from the The Post to a Sunken Thread Thread, I thought I'd get back to this one, which I'd hoped would have more of a discussion. I'd thought several times about getting back to it before, but didn't want to come off like my avatar.

    One of the things I've learned, and taken to heart from the I Ching is the idea of not necessarily looking to the acceptance of others when you are following your goals and ideals. To be sure, it's folly to ignore what others say. You should always listen and consider it, to know whether or not you're on the right path.

    But I learned a long time ago that people pidgeonhole one another. We put people into certain holes. We even have the expression "square peg in a round socket" to describe someone who doesn't fit. We expect and even demand that people keep themselves in those roles - from the severity of ancient castes, to everyday pettiness and anger about people in our lives who are failing to uphold our expectations of their role.

    When we try to maintain our high standards, or worse, to implement them when we have previously failed to do so; we run smack into the walls of the cages that others seek to impose on us. They react with anger, they react with sarcasm, they react with disdain, they react with fear. They do anything they can to guilt, shame, scare, cajole or force us back into the role they desire us to play.

    We also run into the variance between our standards and theirs. If ours are higher than theirs, they can react with anger and disdain, either because they are inwardly ashamed that their standards are lower, or because they do not think that our standards are reasonable. Likewise if ours are lower, because they do not meet the other person's standards. They have decided on one course, so why are we deciding a different one?

    (I see kind of the same thing with drivers on the road. People who will drive 60mph in the left lane of a 70mph zone as if God Himself had told them to drive that speed, becoming irate and irrational toward people who desire to drive the speed limit.)

    I could go on about this, but to do so would require a large and meandering course that would be too much for a message board. The point is, we maintain our standards by deciding for ourselves what they should be, while using the standards of others as a balance, as a check, on the correctness of our positions. But we also realize that others have set their own standards by their own decision process (whatever that may be - and we cannot know), and we therefore do not bend and blow at the slightest opposition.

    To change at every opposition, every question of our decision making process, is to have no decision making process of our own. We throw ourselves away, abandoning self-worth in the vain hope of nourishing ourselves on the acceptance of others.
    I reserve the right to be bothered by things that don't faze you,
    and to cheerfully ignore things that bug the shit out of you.
    I am not you.

  7. #7
    Why so serious? Tinker's avatar
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    Default Re: Releasing Attachments, and Maintaining Standards

    Quote Originally posted by Chimera
    The paradox is that in attempting to release our attachments, we remain firmly attached to the illusory ideal of how things should be; that being that we are attached to the idea that we can somehow achieve that state of perfection and be able to do everything easily and smoothly without any pain if we just try hard enough and make ourself perfect enough.

    That is still "attachment".
    Yes few egoes are more impenetrable than the mind that closes itself off because it thinks it is beyond obsession.
    "And I hope I don't get born again, 'cuz one time was enough!" -- Mark Sandman

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