The principle of attachment is something that we all practice subliminally. The truth is that it doesn’t matter whether our practice of attachment is materialistic or non-materialistic – which I will further explain below – there is one common output that any form of attachment performs: it influences our ego.
Materialistic attachment like our cars, homes, people, jewelry, etc. is vivid and realistic and in many cases we use materialistic objects as pawns in a chessboard to show how accomplished we are in comparison with others. Non-materialistic attachment, or those things that are intangible and can’t hold into our hand such as our education, wisdom, ideas, can also be dangerous as it shows how smart we are, great we are, and “so cool” as some people will say.
The dance we play between materialistic and intangible attachment is something that many of us are not even cognizant of – yet it happens. How? It becomes impacted anytime anyone out there questions our sense of being.
By this sense of being I am talking about all of those things that occur to us over time to make us who we are today – right now – at this point in time. Our sense of being is essentially the root of what we have become through all of our experiences at this very point in time.
This sense of being comprises of our materialistic and intangible assets that make up the portfolio of our personal operating system. It drives the way we are programmed, the way we will approach a problem, the way we will react, what we will believe or not believe, or how we interact with others just to name a few.
The art of living a happy life is to understand how to level and balance your ego as you interact with people. Ego is very flexible – but we need to be cognizant of it. Ego can only be lowered in context and in comparison with the ego of another person.
Just to make a small point, it’s sometimes challenging for someone educated with two masters degrees to get to a level of explaining a difficult topic to someone with a 2nd grade education level. Have you noticed there are just better teachers our there than others? I have.
What’s also challenging is how someone so materialistic can fit-in with the masses that are non-materialistic. Have you noticed how challenging it is for some people to relate to your way of thinking? In many cases you are not reading off the same page in the book.
How do we increase cognition of ego-leveling? How is it that aligning our ego with the ego of others can make this world a better place? How can this leveling create more non-violence around us?
Things can get dangerous when we find any kind of difference or shortfall of others – our ego shows us how great we are which is never a good thing. The truth is anything that puts us on a pedestal of glory is probably the worst thing that you can do yourself. Modesty is and always will be the king of the universe.
Yet what happens in day-to-day life is that we fall in love in finding differences in people. Why should we strive to find similarities when we seek a diverse world? This is the dilemma of the world we live in: we are made different yet we need to live together despite our differences.
This is our struggle – how is it that we can learn to love similarities between us when the world is designed in such a way that presents differences between us. Climbing walls and boundaries takes work and effort is not easy and why should we do this work?
We are lazy, we want the easy way out. It’s easy to find differences. The challenge becomes how to keep your ego at bay considering the differences. This is the challenge I put on all of you to experiment with.
Our ego creeps inside and formulates opinions about hatred of people. Any difference we find, we can develop characteristics of hatred to exacerbate our relationship. We increase our tone of voice if people “don’t get our point.” We raise our hand if strangers “make fun of us” We make pointless conversations about people “as gossip” as we have nothing better to do.
All these actions become aggregated creating an operating system within us that teaches us to hate others. What we don’t realize is that hatred can be crushed – we need to be aware of what we doing. There is nothing in this world that can’t be resolved with a calm and cool mind. Yet, we let our egos crush the idea of creating non-violence.
People are not picking on us. We are perfect. It’s their ego at work in depressing our ego. The one action I want you to take is this: Accept all things as they are because that is the way it was intended to be.
There is nothing you can do ever to force anyone to think like you. This is pointless as our world thrives on diversity. When you seek the love of hating violence what you will find is acceptance of all things – people, nature, animals, etc. – as it is intended to be in their natural uninfluenced habitat.
Use your ego to realize that all people are not the same as you. If we are not the same, why are you raising your voice in disagreement? If we are not the same, why are you raising your hand in frustration? If we are not the same why are you raising a gun or knife to confront your stress?
This “raising” of your voice, hand, gun, or knife is actually killing you inside. This “raising” is going beyond your ego. You are not above anyone nor are you below anyone.
My message to you is simple: if you want to hate one thing in life, hate violence. It doesn’t solve anything. Build this into your value system and what you will find is that your voice is never raised, your hand is never raised, and you never need to lift a gun or knife. Keep your ego in balance and you never need to “rise” above anyone.
There will always be others better than you by design, but you are also better than others. No one loses. We all win. Now we are at the same level. Just hate violence.