Reply #5: Fear of death = attachment to life

[jobycom]

Attachments aren't talking about addictions or physical necessities, it refers to your desire to have something in your life. Life itself, for instance, or wealth, or a pareticular person. It is both fear of losing that and reality of losing it which creates suffering.

And it isn't so much the thing you must get rid of as the attachment to it. You can have wealth without feeling an attachment to it, so that if you lose it, you will feel no pain at the loss.

The one place I don't entirely agree with that aspect of Buddhism is concerning people. Attachment to loved ones is the strongest of all attachments, but giving that up weakens the social aspect of humanity. It may be better for an individual to feel that they can lose a loved one without suffering, but it weakens the love, and to my mind it is love which elevates us from individual to collective humanity. Love is the divinity that all religions try to find. But with Buddhism, sometimes it seems that the only love they recognize is love of self, though in a spiritual and not material sense. It's a way to live, but I'm not sure it's the best. But it does help relieve suffering.

My own attachments are my children. I think I can lose anything else without much suffering, but not them. I'm not sure I will exist if they don't. And I'm not sure that's a complete negative. It makes me protective of them, it gives me something I value more than myself, so that I can truly understand that I am not the only aspect of the universe, and it teaches me to understand that there is a greater good than myself. But it also means that if something happens to them, I will suffer greatly, or else I will die, and the latter would cause suffering to others and would mean that I haven't placed humanity above myself. Which creates an enigma, since both my attachment to my children and a detachment from them could cause me to be more selfish and less a part of humanity.

Man, it's a slow day at work. I wonder if my boss knows he pays me for this.