Freedom from Attachment & Detachment

Lately, I have been thinking about attachment and detachment. I believe that one goes through different stages of development in ones quest for peace & happiness. Given a situation, when I am given the grace to be mindful, I try to ask myself where I stand in relation to an event, object, person, etc… This often tells me how much I can truly benefit from or give of myself when considering the situation at hand. This also presents me with the clues on opportunities for learning. There are little substitutes for experiential learning or the wisdom gained from being truly present and open.

Having stated the above, I must clarify that I don’t necessarily consider one stage more important than the other. It is always important to recognize that every impulse or situation comes from the divine and can also lead to the divine. It takes wisdom to recognize when one should be attached or detached to a certain condition. And even more essential, humility and gentleness must also come into play when assessing the state of oneself or another… Sometimes it is okay to be attached and sometimes it is okay to be detached. I feel this wisdom comes when one is able to see the perfection of a seemingly imperfect circumstance. What the Sufis would call, taking the divine perspective.

Some of the questions I might ask myself when contemplating this are:

How attached am I to my status in society?
Am I too detached from my own emotions?
What are the fears that drive me?
When do I feel fully connected with life?

Often, I see how people are attached to their spiritual path or their concept of the afterlife. I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me, these can be unhealthy attachments to have. I don’t want to do good, or not be bad, so I can go to heaven. This mode of thinking does not make sense to me. It defeats the purpose of spiritual attainment. I’ve also come to believe that heaven is always happening all around us.

I love my path, but I want to love it from a space that is free. I want to be free to love. I appreciate Sufism, because it has given me the guidance and ability to recognize this about myself. It has also made me more mindful of my dealings with others. The universe is love in motion. In one sense each particle is connected to the next, but there are also oceans of space between them.

I am referring to 3 different modes/stages:

• Attachment
• Detachment
• Freedom from Attachment & Detachment

I think that we experience some degree of pain when we are attached. I think this is true whether we recognize this or not. With detachment, I feel that there is something we are missing in the experience of life, which is a beautiful gift. I believe that to be in the world but not of it, a certain Freedom from Attachment & Detachment is an ideal space to strive for. I think there is a certain maturity that comes whenever we achieve this in any given situation. We are also blessed with the ability to act in a manner that is beneficial to everyone around us.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

I just got done watching "The Five People You Meet in Heaven." It was an interesting movie. As my roommate Barry puts it, almost like "Big Fish." I did enjoy "Big Fish." Movies that deal with the afterlife in this manner always make me think about the Sufi concept of creation & the afterlife. In my humble opinion, a movie that most closely approximates the first part of this journey is "What Dreams May Come."

New Links

I added a few links today mainly to the Sufi orders I have a connection with. I also included I link to an online collection of The Message Volumes of Hazrat Inayat Khan founder of the Chishti Inayati lineage of Sufis (Sufi Order of the West/Sufi Order International and the Sufi Movement). These are on a website I maintain.

The Sufi message calls upon us to cultivate that relationship through whatever outer form, in the framework of whichever religion. Each religion is a providential dispensation that can serve to accommodate an inner opening toward the truth.

In this era in which we live, there has been a global awakening. The world is coming together in ways that have never been possible. There seems to be the prospect -- the danger, on the one hand, of a unification on the level of homogeneity, if not uniformity. On the other hand, there seems to be the prospect of a unity within diversity, a recognition of the providential nature of the diversity of religious forms, but awakening to the essential unity that pervades and underlies them.

That is the essential goal of the Sufi message in our time -- to unite the segments of humanity, which are like organs of a single body that has become dismembered and that must reunite through the guidance of the heart to function as a single body for the sake of the health of all of the different parts. That is the message that must be heard in this era.

- Pir Zia Inayat Khan

The fundamental mode of knowing in Sufism is called "knowledge by presence." All other knowledge is knowledge by correspondence, which refers to conceptual knowledge. But conceptual knowledge itself must be grounded in a fundamental, epistemological act, and that is knowledge through presence -- the knowledge of immediacy, of direct experience, the unification of witness and witnessed. This is what is experienced essentially in the depths of meditation. This gives one a faith that is unshatterable.

- Pir Zia Inayat Khan

Sufism is fundamentally experiential. It is not based on intellectual premises. It is based on direct, personal experience. And so we seek not to discover the truth through book learning but, rather, through reading the manuscript of our own selves and thereby having a direct personal experience. Any faith based merely on speculation will be subject to doubt when the speculation upon which it is based is cast into question. But there is an essential conviction that comes with immediate inner experience, when mystical experience is of such a degree that it is more tangible than the outer world, which is the source of our consensus reality. When that realization is experienced, one arrives at a level of faith that goes beyond the faith of conventional religion -- having been brought up a certain way and, therefore, one believes certain articles of faith.

- Pir Zia Inayat Khan

Sufism is the religion of the heart, the religion in which the most important thing is to seek God in the heart of mankind.

- Hazrat Inayat Khan

We are passing around the camera, making fun. Doug and I were initiated into Sufism on the same day several years ago. 

Sufi friends of Geneve from Sarasota. They are also from the Chishti Inayati Tarikat, my first and primary order. I also belong to the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Order of Sufis. 

10 Sufi Thoughts

by Hazrat Inayat Khan



1) There is one God, the Eternal, the Only Being; none else exists save God.

2) There is one Master, the Guiding Spirit of all souls, who constantly leads all followers towards the light.

3) There is one Holy Book, the sacred manuscript of nature, which truly enlightens all readers.

4) There is one Religion, the unswerving progress in the right direction towards the ideal, which fulfils the life's purpose of every soul.

5) There is one Law, the law of Reciprocity, which can be observed by a selfless conscience together with a sense of awakened justice.

6) There is one human Brotherhood, the Brotherhood and Sisterhood which unites the children of earth indiscriminately in the Fatherhood of God.

7) There is one Moral Principle, the love which springs forth from self-denial, and blooms in deeds of beneficence.

8) There is one Object of Praise, the beauty which uplifts the heart of its worshipper through all aspects from the seen to the unseen.

9) There is one Truth, the true knowledge of our being within and without which is the essence of all wisdom.

10) There is one Path, the annihilation of the false ego in the real, which raises the mortal to immortality and in which resides all perfection.

Doug and I went to the Sufi Conference in Black Mountain, NC on May of 2004.