Vodou Culture 201: Attachment
Resistance to change is a sign of immaturity but a very normal part of consciousness for most people, along with a life littered with attachments. I’m going to partially define attachment by way of seeing its effect. The easiest way to see your attachments is to see what you need to stay the same in order to feel safe and comfortable—the things and people around you which cannot change if you are to feel safe and comfortable. Whatever has to be the same for you, you have an attachment to which is not particularly good for your spiritual development.
Phrased that way, it gets a lot easier to see how attachment is related to resistance to change: an attachment is a delusional relationship with the state of your environment where you have to deny that anything has changed in order to avoid emotional distress. That avoidance can result in anger or violence, where it is not simply delusional.
If nothing is allowed to change, please know it already has changed and you’re just pretending it hasn’t.
It’s also a lot easier to see why attachments are a sign of spiritual immaturity. Attachments are a dependency on the world around you to tell you how you are, which is uses to tell you who you are. Where your identity, sense of self, sense of safety, and/or ability to recognize the world around you relies on a delusion, it signals that you do not know who you are. You cannot distinguish yourself from your environment.
This is typically where people get excitable about the topic, to which I respond: you are free to notice the environment, it just cannot provide you with who you are or how you are. Maturity is, among other things, the capacity to know who are you and how you are no matter what’s going on around you. Noticing your environment is not the same thing as letting the environment tell you who you are and how you are.
Attachment is also frequently confused with love. Love has nothing to do with attachment, though people often confuse the desire to prevent someone from changing for an interest in their welfare. In the same way that demanding your environment be a specific way to avoid distress, demanding people be a certain way to avoid distress is not about an interest in their welfare. It’s the demand that the person who has the attachment should have the ability to dictate the way people, situations, and environments work, so that they don’t have to be uncomfortable, surprised, afraid, etc.
You can have relationships with your environment and the people in it which are not delusional. Getting people there is one of the things a priest or spiritual worker can do to help you elevate.
