On Detachment

  • Humans are very focused on surviving this reality they find themselves in and subject to. This is a hallmark of the secular. It focuses on the physical-emotional world around us and denies the existence of anything beyond reality. Most of our most basic human drives (survival, security, sexual, hunger) really emerge from a long evolution of internal processes designed to increase the chances of our passing on our genes to the next generation. Some of these responses, like blink of the eye when something is about to enter it, are nearly impossible to control. Others of these secular responses, like sexual desire, we are expected by society and the sacred to control. Many of these secular needs and drives are very sensible when viewed for the solely secular functions they satisfy. Today there is a great tension between the secular and the sacred because of the secular, society-wide expectation that many of these drives and needs are perfectly okay to pursue. [62F/W’13]
  • Yet many philosophies and religions representing the sacred insist on or find the highest human good to be detachment from reality (as in buddhism, asceticism, or perhaps the Greek Stoics) or to seek to deny or dramatically restrain free abandonment to many of the most basic human instincts derived from evolution of the species by necessity (as in the abrahaminic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). It is interesting in itself that the divinity-focused religions like the latter and the non-divinity philosophies like the former have this feature in common. It is a feature that allows some integration and synthesis across divided aspects of the sacred. It is also interesting that this teaching is so diametrically opposed to the most fundamental of human needs representing the secular. Clearly this is a contributor to the growing chasm.[63F/W’13]
  • What does ananthropic theology and anduranormism say about this teaching of detachment? Ironically these more physical-world-based teachings also require “detachment” though it has both aspects that are similar and different from that taught in the above cited philosophies and religions.  [132Sm’14]

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