I think we’re surprised to learn that the deepest attachment, the most primordial, is attachment to being approved of, being validated – basically, the craving to be liked.
You see, this is the thing about having attachment in the first place: it’s the main voice of the root delusion – ignorance, marigpa, the sense of a concrete, solid self – and one of the functions of that grasping at that self is the feeling of a separate self. So the attachment is driven by the feeling deep inside that I don’t have enough, I’m not enough; always dissatisfied.
When you look at the lamrim, they’re taking us according to our ability. In the second scope, where they talk about attachment, there’s no discussion about attachment to reputation. When you hear this term in Buddhism, “eight worldly dharmas,” which is a strange concept, that’s actually taught in the Mahayana, the great scope, and this is touching upon a much more primordial level of attachment.
The eight worldly dharmas have to do with not just reputation, but the way attachment plays out in daily life, every millisecond; it’s constantly there. There are four pairs in this presentation, four pairs of the way attachment functions at this more primordial level.
The first one is just this constant assumption – attachment at the level of an assumption, deep in our bones – that I have to have nice feelings, happiness, all the time. There’s a constant craving for nice feelings, and then the millisecond an unpleasant feeling comes, like you stub your toe or something, now attachment shifts from craving a nice feeling to craving to be free of an unpleasant feeling. So now you find all the methods like taking a pill to stop the pain, driven every second by the craving to be free of the pain, the unpleasant feeling. That attachment is pervasive. Do you hear that point? That’s the first pair.
Then the next pair is attachment to having things, getting things –and then when you don’t get them, attachment to being free of not getting things.
The next two pairs seem very similar but they’re different. The next pair is attachment to hearing nice words with your name in them. This is not reputation – this is praise, this is more gross, I’d suggest. If there’s any discussion and your name is in that discussion, the words have to be praise, which we crave desperately.
Then as soon as you hear the unpleasant word, the criticism, look at the pain? Now attachment instantly shifts to being free of the unpleasant words, trying to do anything at all to make that pain go away and to hear nice words. Do you get my point?
The most subtle, my feeling is, is this fourth one: the most deep, the most primordial, since the time we are born, is this attachment to reputation, this constant craving to being seen as a good girl.
There you are as a tiny baby, don’t know anything, all just intuitive, already you’re born with a certain level of attachment due to the habit of attachment in past lives, and there’s your mother, you know – the first person you meet is your mother.
Already, from the time you’re a tiny baby, there’s this craving to get nice feedback from your mother. You kick your little legs in the air, or something, and she laughs lovingly at you, and that triggers a very pleasant feeling in you: “Oh, wow, I must be a nice person, Mummy just approved of me!”
Next time you kick your legs up, mother looks mean at you – and you burst into tears: “Oh, no, I must be a bad person!” This is how we spend our lives: trying to do and say whatever we think, we hope, will get people to approve of us, to like us.
Of course we have to distinguish between that and a reasonable sense of feedback from people and then use feedback in a virtuous way. But all the time there’s this attachment to being seen as a good girl: the assumption is that if I’m not seen as a good girl then I’m not a good girl. We crave that one tremendously to make us feel that we’re valid – and of course, no matter how much we get, it’s never enough.
So don’t expect it to go away overnight – it’s the deepest part of our junkie mind altogether – but we have to recognize it and slowly heal it. And you don’t have to work on that one all the time. By working on attachment to cake, you weaken attachment in general; working at any level of attachment helps us heal attachment to everything.
So it’s slowly, slowly being conscious of the attachment and then learning to not follow it. For instance with the cake: the thoughts are in the mind still craving the cake, but you at least don’t follow it. It’s the same with attachment to being seen as a good girl: the thoughts are in the mind craving to be seen as a good girl, but you don’t follow them. You practice counteracting it with the thought that you can define who you are yourself.
Recently I was talking to somebody whose partner had left her, and it was devastating: just naturally she assumed she was a bad person because of being rejected. Now the partner’s come back and wants to be in the relationship again.
I said, don’t fall into the trap of just because a person shows they like you again, don’t just follow that. You’ve got to know yourself: Is it the right relationship? Do I want this relationship? And you don’t get sort of strung along by this approval – because we are immediately seduced by that: we’re magnetized by it!
We need to be clear about what is the right thing. In other words, we need to train ourself to follow our own wisdom – not to follow what other people show to us. This is huge! It demands enormous awareness of our mind, and it comes slowly, slowly.
Of course attachment’s not going to go away immediately, of course it won’t – it takes time. You can’t become a pianist overnight – well, you can’t become a fulfilled, content person overnight either, we have to know that.
You work with it, step by step, and then be satisfied with how much you’ve done. We’re a work in progress. You get my point?