What is attachment?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: What is attachment? Please explain with an example.

Acharya Prashant (AP): Mind is the product of time. Anything and everything in the mind is in terms of time. The mind takes time as real. So, whatsoever exists for a long length of time in the mind, the mind takes it as real and becomes attached to it. The mind says, “Oh this is real. If it is real, then it is me.”

The mind is an incompleteness, waiting for completion. It requires some object. Which object would it prefer? It would prefer an object that makes it feel secure and hence it would prefer an object which it can call real. For the mind real is always in terms of time. The mind has no other way of determining whether something is real. Don’t you say, ‘Oh? It has been continuing for 2000 years, how it can be false.’ Have you not heard such things?

‘This temple is 5000 years old; it must be a very respectable temple.’ For the mind, time is the certification of the truth, which means that whenever the mind is in contact with something for a long period of time, the mind will get identified with it and that is — attachment.

Whatever you are with, for a long period of time, you start feeling a relationship with that, — that is attachment. The kind of…