Detachment and Indifference

 A couple of weeks ago I saw a television programme in which an Indian man who had been living in England since he was a small boy and who was, to all appearances, completely Westernised went back to India in order to find acceptance for the death of his father to whom he had been extremely close. The shots where he recollected his love for his father were very touching. He came from a Hindu family but was now an atheist due, no doubt, to the influence of the world in which he, a successful journalist, lived. But his father's death had awoken something in him and though he neither sought nor expected easy answers, he did want to explore his traditional background.

The way he chose to do this was to join a pilgrimage to the Kumbh Mela which is a festival that takes place every 12 years when Jupiter, the sun and the moon form some kind of astronomical relationship. The gathering is the most enormous collection of human beings on the planet and wild horses couldn't drag me there. But for many it is the highlight of their lives. Tens of millions of people attend forming a chaotic mass of humanity, and for Hindus it is one of the holiest events with people making many sacrifices to go and bathe in the river Ganges where they can purify themselves of sin and prepare their souls for Moksha which is liberation. At least, that's the idea. I remember reading once that one of Ramakrishna's disciples asked him if bathing in the Ganges really did wash away your sins. It certainly does, he replied. The trouble is the sins sit in the branches of the trees on the riverside and, unless you are attentive, drop back on you as you come out. A good answer that satisfies both faith and reason - sort of.

In the last post I talked about the need for detachment at the present time. There is always a need for detachment but the fact of the end times makes it more important than ever. I spoke of it meaning not that you don't care but that you are not attached to the caring. This might seem a contradiction in terms so let me explain. You care because this world is real but you are not attached to the care because it is not ultimately real. This world is a reflection of a higher world. That doesn't mean it's not real but that its reality is borrowed not innate. The true reality from which springs any reality this world has is located in the higher world. In the heart of God, you might say.

I mention this because as the journalist in the TV programme was going to bathe in the river at the Kumbh Mela there was a stampede. Hundreds of people were injured and dozens died. Naturally, he was horrified and he sought an explanation of how to react from the spiritual perspective from one of the many sannyasis who were present at the event. Unusually, this was a holy woman rather than a holy man, but she wore the ochre robe that signifies renunciation from the word. 

She told him to respond with indifference because birth and death were all part of life which is eternal. This is fine as far as it goes but the problem is the English word indifference carries the meaning of being, well, indifferent, that is to say, not caring about the pain and suffering there is in the world. You might consider this is just a question of the concepts of one language and culture not transferring accurately when expressed in the terms of another, and there is certainly an element of that. I suspect the word she would have used if speaking in her own language would have been vairagya which is a Sanskrit word meaning detachment and dispassion. It describes the spiritual state of being unattached to worldly matters of any kind, including ideas and beliefs, because one is centred in the eternal reality of being, above all the ebb and flow of events in the external world of space and time. It is not a question of the suppression of desire but the transcending of attachment to it. This is an essential quality to be acquired by any spiritual aspirant, Eastern or Western, that involves transferring the locus of attention from the phenomenal world of cause and effect to the stillness of the spiritual plane which is the underlying reality behind all the movement constantly going on in the material.

In classical Indian philosophy it is understood that dispassion does not negate compassion; that, in fact, properly ordered dispassion opens up the path to real compassion. However, there is a tendency, and this seems particularly the case for the Indian mind, for dispassion to actually mean, or result in, real indifference. That's why India is famous for its combination of spirituality with material squalor and degradation. Admittedly, it can be hard to balance detachment with caring but that is the task we are set, to be detached from the world but love it all the same because of the spiritual. Jesus wept. No one knew the reality of the spiritual world more than Jesus but that knowledge did not cut him off from the suffering in the material world.

I suspect that when this holy woman spoke of indifference to the deaths of many men and women at the pilgrimage she really was largely indifferent. I don't judge or condemn her because it is challenging when removing oneself from the world and transferring conscious attention to spirit to retain concern for the world. That is why there is always an element of balancing opposites on the spiritual path, of not going too far in one or another direction but standing on the edge of the razor sharp path. We must have detachment from the world but we must also have detachment from ourself. Then we will find (or so I have been told!) that love arises.