Dispassion and non-attachment

I think I mentioned the other day I've been reading this collection of the Buddha's discourses, taken from the Pali canon and rearranged by subject.

I read one last night or the night before in which Master Gotama (and his translator) describe 'dispassion' as a desirable trait. While I think I had seen the adjective 'dispassionate,' this was the first time I had encountered 'dispassion' as a noun. I Googled it to make sure there really was such a word, and there is.

I've been wondering if dispassion and apathy are the same thing, and I've decided they aren't.

Apathy is not caring –– dispassion is caring with boundaries. The mess in Washington, for example: I do care, but I have learned to not work myself into a rage about it. I've ended my habit of posting enraged, ranting comments on political web sites. So that's dispassion, not apathy.

State politics? Apathy. Truly. I should care, but I don't.

Years ago, I had a friend lecture me about how I didn't seem 'passionate' about anything. Actually, I had several friends lecture me about it, and I sort of bought into it. Looking back on it now, I see that what they called 'passion' was what I would now call 'manufactured drama.' Even though I was neither Buddhist nor Taoist nor much of anything back then, I was actually closer to the truth than they were.

Which gets me to non-attachment, which is not unlike detachment. Those of you who've done any therapy relating to codependence, or read Janet Woititz or Melody Beattie (did I spell that right?) are familiar with the concept of detachment. Similarly, the Buddha taught non-attachment. If you're attached and you want to be non-attached, you have to detach.

I went through my list of attachments. This is harder than it sounds, because the stuff you detach from most readily is the stuff to which you're not really attached at all. Babyshit-flavor ice cream, for example. Totally non-attached to that. FOX News... non-attached. 'American Idol'... non-attached. Dan Brown novels... non-attached.

So what's the problem? The stuff to which we are really attached. I mean, we're so attached we won't even admit to ourselves we're attached, so when we're pondering the stuff to which we're attached, this is under the blobs of white-out we've painted there so we won't see it.

I can tell you that meditatation really helps. Not intense, furrowed-brow concentration, but just quiet attention to the breath. Letting ideas enter your mind, then watching them float away.

Some ideas and notions and goals to which I was very attached floated away like that.

The way you know you've detached –– rather than just denied yourself –– is that you feel liberated and released, not resigned and deprived and defeated.

On iTunes: Tala Sawari, Ravi Shankar.