In Eastern thought, detachment is a state that doesn't condemn desire or give in to it, either. This is a strange alternative, since 99% of the time our natural inclination is to either give in to a desire or push it away, usually for a competing desire. We eat when we're hungry, we diet when we think hunger doesn't serve us well and we want to be thinner instead. What would it even mean to be detached from hunger? The twists and turns of the detachment argument have worried generations of seekers, and still do.
When told that detachment is desirable (that word again!), seekers are given certain points, not all of them consistent:
--Detachment means that your desire are raised from lower to higher.
--Detachment comes about by transcending your desires.
--If you listen to your soul--which is already detached--it will lead you out of the prison of desire.
--The mind craves things out of habit and can never be detached until its habits are broken.
--Desire moves naturally along a path that will eventually end in freedom from desire--detachment is this evolved state.
--Desire is an endlessly revolving wheel, and it can only be escaped by stepping off. By stepping away you become detached.
--God favors purity of mind and body, which requires abstinence and renunciation. These are the essence of detachment.
--Detachment is the same as overcoming the material world; this must be done to attain a higher world.
Nobody can adhere to all of these dicta, and since they often contradict each other, the result is conflict and confusion. (In the West, Jesus's involvement with the poor and his teaching of love seems to negate detachment, calling for its opposite, a passionate commitment to God.) There is a way out of confusion, which consists of placing desire where it belongs, as a natural aspect of everyday life. That is, one can handle desire basically the same way one's society dictates. If a woman must be extremely modest in Muslim society, that doesn't dictate behavior to a Catholic sunning herself on a beach on the Riviera.
Desire is a give-and-take between what you want to do and what is allowed. On one side is society, on the other our raw impulses. Society also includes family upbringing, religious teaching, and peer pressure. Each of us has to pay attention to these factors. We are all engaged in the same give-and-take, which keeps changing. Living out of wedlock and having illegitimate babies were both socially unacceptable in our parents' generation but much less so now. The forces that push desire back and forth exist inside and outside our social selves.
This give-and-take isn't spiritual. The spiritual life consists of paying attention to something else--the expansion of one's consciousness. Just as growing from infancy to adulthood radically shifts what you want from life, so does growing spiritually. Desire is always involved, but it's inner desire, not the impulses governed by society.
The phrase "second attention" has always seemed appealing to describe the difference between the two. In first attention you deal with the material world. In second attention you experience something else: silent mind, Being, the numinous, the presence of the soul, the transcendent.
Detachment, then, consists of second attention. If you put little stock in what it's about, you aren't detached. If you put value on it, detachment increases. Which is to say, you integrate more Being, essence, or the divine into the structure of yourself. The self has an endless capacity to accommodate new things. It may happen, as second attention grows, that the things which dominate first attention--money, sex, family, status, possessions, success--begin to shift down, and eventually the appeal of the transcendent may take you outside material considerations altogether. This would be the state Jesus describes as being in the world but not of it.
For the time being, no one has to pretend that the world is irrelevant or evil. Detachment is a process, not a pretense. And it seems to be a natural process, as one can learn by conversing with mature people who have deeply considered their own lives. The beauty of detachment is that it needn't be a doctrine or a religious dictum. It can be the way your life is going once you contact the inner person who wants more than material desires can bring.
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