"Attachment is not love. Attachment is the shadow of the ego. " -Osho
Love is free. Attachment isn’t. Love holds no requirements. Attachment does. People don’t break your heart. They break your expectations. Humans beings mistake attachment for love. Yet attachment and Love are not one and the same. Attachment has everything to do about us and about our own selfish desires concealed behind the façade of selfless love. When we love from a place of attachment, we love from a place of conditional love, as we expect the person to whom our love is attached to, to love us back. Our complete identification with this "self", this "I", is what makes us suffer tremendously when the so called "Love" we have for someone isn’t being reciprocated.
When you come to think of it, the root of all of our problems come from this precise place. With this attachment to our false sense of identity. We act from a place of possession in all the different spheres of our lives. "This is my money. " "This is my job. " "This is my spouse. " "This is my place" , "This is my life. " None of these things are even ours to begin with. Ironically, they don’t even need us to keep on following the course of their timelines. Your money will surely keep on being money and keep on being exchanged, even if it is no longer in your bank account tomorrow. The same stands true for your job, your place, your spouse, and even tragically, your life. But from our flawed perspective, we couldn’t imagine ever being ok with losing the attachment we have with our money, our work, our partner, and most of all, our life.
Love is like happiness in the way that we can’t be attached to its presence. As doing so will inevitably lead to unnecessary suffering when its absence makes itself felt. The truth of the matter is that everything in life is meant to be temporary. It is not a lack of happiness per say that causes misery, but the desire we have for happiness to be permanent. Just like it is not Love that brings us pain, but our attachment to the object of our love that makes us drown in a pool of suffering.
The three most powerful words in the English language are notably the " I love you " ones. Interestingly, when we do pronounce them, what exactly do we mean by them? Do we love the person who Is, or do we love the conception that our mind has of this person? If the " You " no longer loves us back, does the " I " still love? If by some tragic unknown circumstance the " You " became a completely different person right here and now, would we still have love for them? Or is our own Love, that we so proudly like to claim as ours, locked in the prison of our own attachments?
