Winning Over Attachment

When a camera is loaded with a piece of plain white paper, however long we may keep the lenses open against any well lit object, no impression of the object concerned can dirty the paper. On the other hand, if that very same sheet of paper is sensitised, then even a slight exposure will leave impressions of the object upon it.Similarly, a mind plastered with attachment soon gathers onto itself impressions (vāsanās) during its contacts in the external fields of activity. The Lord advises us to act without attachment, so that instead of gathering new impressions, we may make use of our activities for the exhaustion of the existing vāsanā-dirt in our mental equipment.Attachment becomes a clog or a painful chain on us only when it is extremely egocentric. To the extent we work for larger schemes to bless a vaster section of humanity, to that extent the attachment loses its poison and comes to bless the age.Many poisons serve as medicines in their diluted form, while the same in a concentrated form can bring instantaneous death! The ego and egocentric desires bind and destroy man, but to the extent he can lift his identifications to include and accommodate in it larger sections of the living world, to that extent the attachment gathers an ethical halo, a divine glow, and becomes a cure for our subjective pains.A true hero is not one who can face an army and kill a few, but one who can save himself. A true warrior is only he who can tirelessly fight in the inner world, and gain a victory over his own mind and attachments.One who can act in the world’s battlefield of actions, ever ruling over and never surrendering to the arrows of attachments that fly towards one from all directions, is the real immortal hero, who can thereafter sit unarmed on the chariots of mortal heroes, and without raising any weapon, can guide the destinies of many an army in every Kurukṣetra!!.Desire does not in itself execute its follies; it deludes the sense organs, the mind and the intellect, and orders them to do the mischief in our lives.