I was inspired to write this in response to an email; I share it here as I found what I wrote here to be inspiring at least to myself... so I can remember the echo of these words in hopes to resisting less, acknowledging more, and essentially living deeper within non-attachment.

From my experience, the goal is to create the conditions of happiness for yourself... if you think/work on others, it goes no where.

Work on happiness of your own regardless of others, then you would naturally be an inspiration for others should they be open to it or not... regardless... i.e. be only self-inspired, self-engaged, self-empowered, self-referenced with a 100% quota of self-compassion

What I wrote about non-attachment is from my practice, though I was trained in Raja Yoga, then Tantra by an Avadhutta, and later through Sufism. I have little to zero training in Buddhism, though I've also studied and explored Zen.

It is interesting about positive thinking, because negative thinking will take you to paranoia, anxiety, stress, fear... negative thinking will just make you unstable, ineffective, power-less.

So positive thinking is empowered... though it's not as simple as renouncing the negative thoughts... as that could be no more than pushing them back into the unconscious, and eventually back and down into sub-conscious where they bottle up and re-surface later as some disease/disorder.

So they key is NOT to renounce negative thinking, this is very bad and unhealthy practice. The key is to increase awareness, accept all aspects of yourself including especially the negative without judgment. This allows you to begin to accept your being in whole. Gradually we come to learn that when we think negative it immobilizes us, so we naturally drop the negative thoughts by awareness/realization rather than renouncing/detaching/segregation.

Non-attachment is beyond all this positive and negative thinking, it has absolutely nothing to do with either. Non-attachment is fundamentally as different from detachment as it is with attachment.

In Buddhism, the descriptions I've read of Bodhisattva consciousness is the living way, or embodiment of what I mean when I say non-attachment.

Non-attachment is holding on to nothing while all things come and go to and from you without any resistance.

If you ask yourself the question constantly "Am I resisting?" and if there is even the slightest subtle-sub-thought that you are, this means this is not yet non-attachment.

non-attachment in action will look like accepting the responsibility of having been born in this world without resistance. I for one, am still striving and still bettering myself at resisting less while accepting the responsibility of having been born through awareness/realization rather than self-will... as that is the way of non-attachment.


NOTE: The attached image is from Tibetan Bon Religion Shenlha Okar (gShen-lha `Od-dkar), also sometimes called Tapihritsa. This image is especially intimate to me as the state of consciousness portrayed through the image is close to some of my inner-experiences.