Hurt by conflicts with the attached ones?

Question: Whenever any conflict arises between myself and the ones I am attached to, why does it hurt me?

Acharya Prashant: It is because we don’t comprehend the nature of duality, so we want to have one side of duality while trying to avoid the other side. And that cannot happen.

One is attached. And just as one is attached to her opinions, one is attached to her family members, friends, relatives as well. The central quality is — attachment. So one is attached to her opinions and one is attached to her friends.

Now the friends say something that hurts her opinions. The opinions are important because one is attached to them. And because the opinions are important and one’s opinions are being hurt and violated, so one decides to not to talk to her friends and create a little more distance.

But the same quality of attachment that holds her to her opinions also holds her to her friends. So now hurt in another direction rises. You create distance from your friends because they are hurting you, but when you are distant from your friends that itself starts hurting you. And now you are stuck — “What to do?”

What one doesn’t see is that in both these relationships — the relationship that one has with her thoughts, ideas, opinions, the relationship that one has with her possessions, her past, her memories, and the relationship one has with those around her — are all being governed by the same, central principle.

And the central principle is often not of Realisation, or Wisdom, or Love. The central principle is of attachment.

Now, what is ‘attachment’?

The ego is a little, incomplete thing — both little and incomplete, desperate somehow to complete itself. So desperate that in its movement through life, in its movement through time, space and inexperience whatever it comes across, irrespective of the merit of the object it comes across, it just clings to it. That is ‘attachment’.

Like a thirty man who also happens to be blind, and he is so overpowered by his thirst, that if he just gropes, gropes, gropes, and he is so desperate, he is so thirsty that he tries to drink it blindly. He won’t exercise caution, he won’t exercise discretion. He won’t try to know…