Attachment is a complex and multifaceted concept deeply intertwined with human emotions, desires, and spiritual understanding.
At its core, attachment is seen as a substitute for divine love. People become attached to objects, people, or ideas because they are unaware of their true nature as a boundless and omnipresent effulgence of pure love and light. This attachment is a way to preserve closeness and connection, but it is also recognized as negativity and a result of frustration of the heart. It is a negative kind of merging that is not real, and it is driven by a desire for divinity that is frustrated by the sense of boundaries.
Attachment can manifest in various forms, such as attachment to essential forms, existence, identity, and even spiritual states. When individuals finally experience their essential worth, they might become attached to it, hindering their learning and maturation. True Nature constantly evolves; attachment can prevent the soul from moving forward. The attachment to existence is seen as a contraction and suffering, and it must be relinquished for complete liberation from suffering. Attachment to identity is also seen as a form of hell and frustration, and the dissolution of identity is necessary for regaining Oneness and merging into the cosmic level.
The path of the heart in the Diamond Approach also reveals that attachments become idols filling the heart’s sacred space, and even attachments to spiritual states are seen as distractions. Essence, the purest form of being, will naturally expose attachments as restrictions, leading to nonattachment and freedom from all attachments. The realization of nondifferentiated reality is essential to dispose of attachment, and the more complete the realization, the less attachment there will be.
Furthermore, attachment is not only related to positive desires but also to negative states. Myriad attachments can feed the ego, and surrendering attachment to realization is essential for spiritual growth. Even after experiencing the Absolute, attachments may remain habitual obscurations that must be worked out. The state of attachment itself is seen as suffering, and it is not just the loss of the object of attachment that brings suffering but the experiential state of attachment itself.
You put yourself in a form, in a package, and that limits you. If you can see the package from all sides, obviously you are not what’s inside the package. If you can allow this perception to happen, then it is possible that you may see that you are beyond all that. You may see that your universe does not define you and must not define you. At the moment that you are defined by that universe, or any content in it, you’re trapped. You are in the middle; you are in it. You are at the mercy of all the forces within that personal universe. If you allow yourself to see the whole, then it is possible to see that you are really none of it. There is no need to attach yourself to that universe or any part of it, nor to define yourself by it or any part of it. And it is possible for that universe to continue in whatever way it continues without your having to take it to be you. – Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, ch.3