Non-attachment redux

A friend offered this item from zenhabits.com about non-attachment.

Letting Go of Attachment, From A to Zen | zenhabits.com

Back in 2006 I wrote a post about non-attachment. I'll post the relevant quote here:

"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 wrote that more than four years ago. At the time, I thought I was making great progress in removing attachments. And yet it's been only in the past ten days or so that I've been able to scratch the white-out off my rather basic and obvious attachment to stacks and stacks of old books. I've kept some around for twenty-five years or more, even though I rarely read them more than once.

I stayed attached to them because they made me feel erudite and intelligent, and it was important to me to be able to view myself that way. Part of the reason I'm able to let go of the books now is because I previously started divesting of the attachment to feeling erudite and intelligent.

Letting go of that doesn't mean I now view myself as poorly-educated and stupid. It means that I am in the process of outgrowing any opinion or judgment one way or the other.

(By the way, this also doesn't mean I'm going to turn anti-intellectual and start believing in Palinism, fundamentalism, creationism, UFOs, New Age and the like. Magical thinking is also an attachment. I still believe what I believe; I'm just not hanging my personal identity on it.)

In the meantime, there's still a lot of crap in this house.