Demystifying Spirituality: Detachment

The word detachment is easily misunderstood. First, it’s a negative way of referring to something highly positive. Second, the word has connotations that can sound cold and aloof, as in clinical or scientific detachment – or even bring to mind the psychopathology of “attachment disorders,” which are characterized by low levels of emotional attachment to others.

More Than an Ego (Was that the Bee Gees?)

Everyone has a sense of themselves as mattering more than others, maybe more than everyone else put together. Too absurd for most of us to hold as an actual belief, it nevertheless describes a certain fundamental feeling that we have for ourselves from very early in life. And although egoism has value up to a point – the more so the younger we are – we are called to outgrow it. We are called by a greater, growing sense of who we are by whose light we recognize egoism as a narrow and unrealistic perspective – one that’s finally harmful to ourselves as well as others.

So you might say that anyone who experiences detachment from ego experiences “attachment” to this larger, more generous sense and idea of where we stand in relation to the wider world. “Attachment” here really isn’t the right word because of its clingy (egoistic) connotations, but I use it to help suggest that detachment is a warm, human thing that doesn’t involve becoming cold, aloof or distantly otherworldly in the way a saint might be portrayed in a movie. Detachment means stepping into a perspective that is more passionately caring and more realistic than ego’s – one that doesn’t skew and distort all that we see according to our personal desires and our frustrations when these are unmet.

It’s Not Unusual… (although I can’t vouch specifically for Tom Jones…)

While the word detachment is usually used to refer to people who have gone a long way toward making this more generous self and perspective their home – i.e., their primary identity – detachment is best thought of as a process. One that, it seems to me, many of us have already gotten underway with to some extent. Consider, for example, the way that many of us become better workers as we begin to do our work with less ego involvement. A personal example: in my twenty-three years of working with children, I only had to physically restrain students twice. That second time, I had no other options. The first, however, early in my career, really wasn’t necessary. Long story short is that my twenty-five year old ego got hooked by a fourteen year old’s.

Or consider the truism about “mellowing with age.” While not true for everyone, it’s certainly true for many people – that as they grow older, the rough edges of their personalities even out. I think of my dad and a number of uncles and aunts who, as they grew older, gradually became more willing to listen to different points of view and much more open to people unlike themselves than they were when they were younger.

As members of the WWII generation who had little exposure to alternatives – at that time, popular culture in the west was still pretty much uninfluenced by eastern religions – they tended to either embrace their inherited religious tradition as they received it or reject spirituality and religion altogether. Terms like “spiritual growth,” “egoism” and “detachment” just weren’t phrases you’d have heard from any of my older relatives. Yet without talking the talk, most of them walked the walk -- moved, over the course of their lives, toward greater breadth of vision and depth of compassion.

“Detachment” is a process of leaving behind disproportional self concern and the shrill, defensive emotions that accompany it to discover that we have a greater heart and a broader vision of our place in the world and our relations to others. Detachment is seeing self and others through eyes that are our own and yet more than our own.