The Buddhist principle of all suffering being rooted in attachment is conceptually easy to understand but often difficult to apply .
What’s with that ?
I mean how can a practice that is, by nature, austere be so complex ?
Let’s back up … we die … (actually that’s fast forward) and when we do, everything that we had here is, in the absence of a heartbeat, free from our attachment to it.
First in line for your attachments will be the Government. They deserve their cut …right ?🙄
Then you have the family members who feel an entitlement to your assets …And then the rest is left in some storage facility until it is given or thrown away .
And where are you?
In ashes. In an urn, on someones mantle or floating across your favourite body of water.
You have no clutching hands and no space in that urn to cling to anything .
Last time I checked pretty much everyone dies… eventually.
So considering the inevitable reality of the two previous points (gonna die and can’t take much along for the ride) why do we cling to things material at all ?
How is it possible siblings destroy family bonds in the name of something that happened decades ago which at some point in time was attached to some physical item or some position of status?
The lengths gone to in the name of settling scores and control are far greater than any distance between two points in the physical world .
So why ?
At this point, my best guess is that as we age our sense of self is all too often defined by the memories and stuff of days gone by.
Thing is though, that makes about as much sense as defining any individual existence in the way articulated by the late great drummer and eccentric Keith Moon who once said “ the one with the most toys wins”
Today, to me, this feels like a fools errand.
When we die, it is the memory of us that lives in the moments our survivors connect with the items we once used or the cash left behind.
It is our love and energy that is missed not our loge at the Bell Centre.
It is what we did with adversity, how we evolved as a person and the love we showed to those we held space for in our hearts that will be immortal… not our cash and stuff.
When we touch the lives of others we are able to witness, fully our existence and how we fit into a bigger picture.
It is our qualities and characteristics that transcend death and it is the smiles we aimed for in those left behind, that they use to remember what it felt like to be with us.
So to achieve immortality the surest way is to create a heart connection, invisible to the eye that slips back out of sight
It’s like we are Obi-Wan facing the storm trooper saying to death “ these (necklaces, rings or whatever) are not the Druids you are searching for and death must surrender the departed to you heart, they live forever.
The secret to immortality then is simply that … be of service to others – create a smile in their hearts and you will prepare a place therein for your existence for the remainder of a life after yours
Further if one has a practice of effort to bring smiles to the hearts of all she touches, then the logic prevails that if immortality is the goal then the greater the number of people one can warm the heart of the greater the number of homes one can posthumously live on in.
This to me seems to be a far more direct path than to spend you’re life trying to amass material or worrying about what form of life your karma will reincarnate you as.
Which simply confirms that “ Immortality can be “a thing” if we can abandon our attachments to the physical and practice existence in the ethereal simply by attaching our existence to hearts and smiles
Making a better past 