Detachment... Another Form of Deception

This is an important subject to understand in the quest to free the mind. We must endeavor to cultivate the mind as 'witness' as opposed to 'reactor' in order to see clearly how easily we are deceived. Many people like to preach "Detachment", only to unwittingly be creating a new "attachment" called "detachment"... hence, the deception. The words of the Buddha speak the truth... but the opposite of attachment is not detachment as our logical minds would incorrectly conclude. It's a tricky business, and I think Krishnamurti sets us straight with his words below:

"We are the things we possess, we are that to which we are attached. 

 Attachment has no nobility

 Attachment to knowledge is not different from any other gratifying addiction. Attachment is self-absorption, whether at the lowest or at the highest level. 

Attachment is self-deception, it is an escape from the hollowness of the self. The things to which we are attached, property, people, ideas, become all-important, for without the many things which fill its emptiness, the self is not. 

The fear of not being makes for possession; and fear breeds illusion, 

the bondage to conclusions. 

Conclusions, material or ideational, prevent the fruition of intelligence, the freedom in which alone reality can come into being; and without this freedom, cunning is taken for intelligence. The ways of cunning are always complex and destructive. It is this self-protective cunning that makes for attachment; and when attachment causes pain, it is this same cunning that seeks detachment and finds pleasure in 

the pride and vanity of renunciation.

 The understanding of the ways of cunning, the ways of the self, is the beginning of intelligence."

"There is only attachment; there is no such thing as detachment. 

The mind invents detachment as a reaction to the pain of attachment. 

When you react to attachment by becoming "detached" you are attached to something else.

So that whole process is one of attachment. You are attached to your wife or your husband, to your children, to ideas, to tradition, to authority, and so on; and your reaction to that attachment is detachment. The cultivation of detachment is the outcome of sorrow, pain. You want to escape from the pain of attachment, and your escape is to find something to which you think you can be attached. So there is only attachment, and it is a stupid mind that cultivates detachment. All the books say, "Be detached" but what is the truth of the matter? If you observe your own mind, you will see an extraordinary thing that 

 through cultivating detachment, your mind is becoming attached to something else."

- Krishnamurti, J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life