To cultivate non-attachment is a Buddhist concept or goal. But how to do it? Well, how else but by detaching from what one is attached to? Both the positive and negative attachments. Things one likes and dislikes.
What does that mean? It means to stop caring. To sever all bonds. To become stone cold and coldest of all toward things you care about the most. This is the point where everyone recoils in horror and chooses some watered down version that can perhaps be described as casually caring or stealthy caring. Still caring very, very much, just not too overtly.
That’s not non-attachment. That’s just caring reimagined and reframed.
But what’s up with this non-attachment anyway? Well, you can’t want to become non-attached in the first place. Because wanting it is an attachment like any other and therefore self negating. Which brings us to what this is: self negation. Non-attachment comes from looking for the self and not finding it.
You can only look for the self at the point where you believe it to be. At the perimeter of what you take yourself to be. Don’t find it there, you retreat a step and the boundary shrinks some. Look again. Nothing there? Repeat. Shrinking ever further.
Until you end up in the exact center. Where nothing is left. The space where everything appears: both what you thought of as you and as the rest of ‘the universe’. You arrive at the screen: at consciousness. And that thou art.
And that’s where non-attachment comes from. Realizing that you don’t exist anywhere. That you are the screen and the content on the screen, realizing that nothing is real and only 1 thing is true.
Your tv doesn’t give a shit if it’s showing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friends. It’s utterly indifferent. Because it doesn’t identify as any of the characters. ‘It knows none of it is real.’ (obviously this is a metaphor you pedantic twat) It doesn’t have to cultivate non-attachment. The thought of attachment doesn’t even enter because it makes no sense.
Cultivating non-attachment seems a brutal process that no-one could want and that’s entirely correct. It is the most brutal process, cold and heartless and no-one wants it because wanting it is impossible.
It is a consequence, the result of looking honestly for what is true and finding out. Disidentifying with the character and realizing you’re the tv. Non-attachment just happens and looks horrific both from the outside and while detaching but it’s nothing once accomplished.