Detached Indulgence vs Indulgent Detachment

Early January is always a little difficult - chalk it up to a post-holiday daze and everyone working at their likely-doomed New Year's resolutions - but this year has been a doozy. I think everyone has felt this way, especially if they're a bit of a Grinch around the holidays, partly because the weather has also been dreary, depressing, and utterly sunless. Personally, it's been quite intense. Since Christmas, I've been dealing with poor health, professional burn out, personal challenges, and a general feeling of my life falling apart.

Everyone turns into a philosopher as soon as shit happens, right?

When faced with difficulties and confused about what to do, a natural inclination is to turn to others for help. It's easy to find someone to talk with about career problems: talk to your manager! Relationship problems? Talk to a therapist! Health problems? Talk to a doctor! But who do we talk to when we're looking for wisdom?

We have this pop culture image of a person making a long, arduous journey to the top of a snowy mountain during a blizzard to speak to the wise hermit guru with no worldly possessions who lives on the peak. It may be a trope, but it raises an interesting question: Why do we seek out those who don't have any possessions when looking for wisdom? I think the answer to that question lies in our mistaken understanding of detachment.

Detachment is a foreign concept to most of us because we can't really point to any examples of what it means to be "detached" the same way we can point to examples of what it means to be beautiful, powerful, famous, or wealthy. As a society, we're fixated on possessing things. Our focus is always to accumulate more and more of everything and hold on to the things we have in our lives: our money, power, and relationships.

We're baffled by those who consciously choose to give up these things and be detached from them.  At the same time, whether we do it consciously or unconsciously, we highly value those people who are detached. We like those people who won't try to take what we see as ours because they do not desire what is ours. We see them as impartial and unmotivated and trust them to act as independent adjudicators.

We innately understand that real detachment is not the absence of possessions; it's the absence of the desire for possessions. In other words, detachment is an internal quality, not an external qualification. But how do we find that detachment in our own lives?

Detachment comes as a by-product of accumulating wisdom. When we see things are they are, we can happily give things up. I've been extremely sick lately, and I understand that excessive eating of quesadillas to drown my feelings is partly the cause of my sickness and that I cannot continue to eat quesadillas if I want to feel better. I may continue to eat quesadillas after I recover - but if I have proper knowledge, then I understand I shouldn't eat them for every meal.

We seek out the people with few possessions when looking for wisdom because wisdom brings detachment from the possessions most of us are searching for. It's not that getting rid of our possessions brings us wisdom. I could throw away all my furniture and sleep on the floor, but that won't make me wise.

One reason it's difficult to practice being detached is because our image of being detached is the hermit living on top of a mountain who sleeps on the floor, eats once a day, and has nothing in the bank. While such a person may be detached (it's not easy to do that), greater detachment can be found in the person who lives in a community, sleeps in a proper bed, eats three meals a day, and has money in the bank - all while remaining internally detached from all of those things. This is what I mean by indulgent detachment.

Real detachment is internal, unaffected by what happens externally, even if the external actions are that of indulgence. Indulgent detachment is our ideal and what we all look for in people who are detached. Think of a charity that doesn't spend any money it collects on its own staff but rather entirely on the cause in question.

It's hard to find examples of indulgent detachment in the world because it's largely covered up by its converse: detached indulgence. Detached indulgence is when the dominant internal mood is one of indulgence, but tempered by a spirit of detachment. It's easy to find: there are many examples of people claiming to be internally detached and possessing all sorts of wealth/power/fame/etc., who turn out to be using it for their own gain.

Detached indulgence isn't inherently bad - there's nothing wrong with having certain impulses your intelligence tells you to avoid. It becomes a problem when we're not honest with ourselves about our level of internal detachment. It's one thing to say, "I don't like quesadillas," and quite another to say, "I like quesadillas, but I'm trying not to eat them so much." Only when we're honest with ourselves can we internally detach from our quesadillas to go from where we are to where we want to go.

This honesty about our present circumstances is the wisdom that allows us to be more detached. The key to unlocking this radical honesty is that we can only be honest with ourselves if we avoid personal enrichment. Think of the ideal charity: no one working for the charity takes a dime of the money coming in, but uses it all for the service of the charity recipients. It's only possible to be truly detached when serving something both greater than and outside ourselves.

This has been my meditation for the past few weeks. Am I acting in a way that's seeking only to serve others, rather than serving myself? Are my thoughts, actions, and habits in connection with something greater than myself? As a spiritual practitioner, are my actions coming from the superficial designations of race, gender, class - or are they coming from my deepest self? In short: where am I on the spectrum between detached indulgence and indulgent detachment?

Happy to be here,
-Sid