Swadharma

When all we have to face is the ordinariness of our everyday lives, our discussion often turns inward.  We try to figure out our own identity, our own moral character, our own relationships, or the dilemmas that arise between our ideas about religion and the world around us.  But sometimes the questions aren’t about us.  Maybe that’s another way of thinking about the idea of detachment – reaching a point where our actions and thoughts are fully altruistic, in the utmost sense of the word.  Detachment isn’t simply a matter of distancing ourselves from material goods or emotional highs and lows, but also of detaching ourselves from ourselves, from the totally natural instinct to evaluate actions or decisions with ourselves in mind.

This is all speaking very abstractly, though, and I’m not sure that such an idea of detachment is necessarily an ideal.  It discredits, for example, the idea of performing good works because you receive an emotional boost, placing yourself at the center of the action.  But that emotional boost is a powerful imperative for action.  It seems like the effects or benefits of the action should be far more significant than the philosophical underpinnings to your decision, or the thought process you use to arrive at a decision.  But maybe this leads back in a circle, arguing that we can detach ourselves from the instinct to always evaluate personal gain by the fact that we don’t actually matter – it’s performing the action itself that counts.

I wanted to bring these ideas out now as we watch tragedy unfold in Haiti.  It’s a natural first step to respond by asking “what can I do?”  And it also seems natural to then say “oh dear, nothing.”  At least, that was definitely my experience.  We’re bombarded by images and stories of human tragedy every day, to such a degree that writing that here seems like a huge melodramatic cliche.  But the fact that we face events and suffering so much larger than ourselves, types of suffering which can never be fixed, solved, or alleviated by the action of a single person, promotes a much darker kind of detachment.  It’s very, very easy to shut the newspaper or turn off the TV because we don’t want to watch anymore or hear anymore.  And that’s why it seems so important to be able to sometimes remove ourselves from the discussion.  What I’m willing to give or do and why I’m willing to do it has no direct relationship to how those actions affect other people, unless they change the effectiveness of the way I act.  What matters is that people are willing, regardless of why, to respond to the needs of others and search for the most effective way to give or act, and most especially in times of crisis.

Related posts:

1. The Dark Knight, Continued
2. Detachment
3. Detachment, attachment, and your loved ones
4. Desire and Suffering in Balzac
5. The Butterfly Effect