Attachment is a white elephant

Acharya Prashant
3 min readAug 8, 2020

Non attachment is simple. How do you get attached? That’s far more difficult and you manage it. Have you ever considered how much investment and energy attachment requires?

Attachment is not cheap, it requires a lot of investment. Attachment is not natural, you require to maintain it. That’s a high maintenance thing. It requires a lot of upkeep. It’s a white elephant

Which means non-attachment should be simple- just stop the upkeep, just block the funds that go towards maintenance of the attachment. When I say funds, I don’t merely mean money, all the emotional capital that you invest in attachment, just stop it. Does anybody want to invest in something that offers negative returns?

Attachment is an investment that gives you negative returns It’s not merely that all that which you have invested goes down the drain; it not only goes down the drain it boomerangs upon you.

When you invest in the shares of a company and the company goes bankrupt, you cry hoarse, you say ‘I invested a million dollars and it has turned to zero’. And it’s so bad that your investment has brought you zero results. Attachment is an investment where you invest a million dollars, and they are gone and the attachment has sent you a notice for 10 million dollars more, and you are obliged to invest another 10 million dollars because you are attached. Not only has the existing investment gone down the drain, it has necessitated further investment . Is that not the story of attachment?

You keep putting more and more into that deep well; it doesn’t get filled up. But you keep putting more and more and your justification is such, that I have already put so much, how do I abandon my existing investment?

Life is short, time is short, resources are short, energy is short. Why spend all that, in clinging to things that are forever threatening to go away?

Tell me, If something were an integral part of you, inalienable part of you, would you require to be attached to it? You don’t require to be attached to your heart, it is not going anywhere, or is it? You don’t have to keep cross checking. It’s there. But you have to be attached to your mobile phone, it can go away somewhere. Don’t invest too much. And if you have to invest, invest rather in your heart. At…