Since 2000 home prices have been going up because they were going up…..people bought the most expensive house they could afford, which drove prices higher, which validated their act and caused more to do the same.

Now home prices are going down because they are going down….buyers wait to buy, sellers rush to sell, and the price keeps getting pushed further down.

The houses have not changed!

Our perception has changed!

As Buddha pointed out thousands of years ago, humans are caught in an unhappy dance with their attachments.

We are attached to our house going up or down in value.

When it goes up in value it seems to make us happy. At the very least it seems to make others happy. And so we all flock to get more houses in search of happiness. The houses go up in value and our happiness goes up in turn….at least it feels that way.

But then houses go down in value. Being deeply attached to the value of the house, this downturn causes unhappiness inside us. We all rush to rid ourselves of the cause of unhappiness and try to sell the house. House prices go down and in turn so does our happiness.

It can be a house, stocks, a job, a relationship, health.

It can be anything!

It is not the thing that causes our happiness or not. It is our attachment to it.

Yet we continue to run around like addicted little chipmunks throwing the world up and down in self fulfilling cycles of hope and pain.

At first the world has not really changed at all. Our perception is what changes. But eventually the world is affected by the actions resulting from our perceptions.

The solution?

Be like Buddha.
Easy? No.
Possible? Yes.
Rewarding? Oh my god yes!

The strange thing is that being like Buddha feels incredibly boring at first. That is why people stuck abusive relationships always pick the exciting asshole over the “boring” nice guy. They are addicted to the roller coaster rush of having somebody or something control their emotions.

Being like Buddha is the act of being aware of our attachments, it is not the act of disconnecting from the world. We are biologically programed to survive and that involves reacting to external stimuli. We are hardwired to be attached to our environment. When the bear comes we are programmed to run like hell and shitting your pants is just a biological way of becoming lighter as you run….

So Buddha didn’t float up into the clouds far away from life. He remained in the village. He burped and farted, laughed and cried.

But the difference is that he did it with awareness. Awareness is what disconnects us from the roller coaster of hope and pain, from the mindless acts of stupidity that usually run our politics, economy and world.

Being aware of our internal process does not shut off the process, which is important since we need the process to survive, but it does lessen your attachment to it. And that is crucial.

We are so incredibly attached. When our children do good we feel like a success. When they do bad we feel like a failure. And the same for everything else in our lif. It reaches ridiculous heights. Some sports fans feel like losers when their national sports team is beat by another country.

The awareness allows us to feel a feeling of success when our children succeed. But it also keeps us from losing ourselves. We retain our inner self. Our inner self continues to guide us and not our attachment to the success or failure of some outside stimuli.

This is ultimately what saves us from being engulfed by the world. Without that awareness of our inner process we flail and spend life constantly on the verge of drowning.

Attachment is nasty for a second reason: it goes against the number one rule of the universe: This Too Shall Change. No matter what it is, it will change. And if you are attached to it you are in trouble because when it changes you are going to feel loss, powerless….

Being aware requires an ongoing practice of Knowing Yourself, exploring yourself, discovering yourself, watching yourself.

It also helps to be spiritual. Spirituality is the ultimate in letting go of attachment. Or at the very least spirituality is being attached to something eternal that never changes and in comparison realizing that everything else will change and thus isn’t worth getting too attached to.

When you let go of attachment that is really when you can enjoy life.

You can dance, sing, laugh, and cry, forever changing, forever moving up and down. But instead of it being a roller coaster that you are strapped into, it is more like a bubbling brook that is servant to nobody except the downward slope of universal gravity.

Tags: attachment, buddha, circles

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Self-help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.