Dispassionate Passion

Seeker: Sirshree, help me to see when to be attached to the world and when to be detached?

Sirshree: Do both. Be attached while being detached. When you are in detached attachment, question of time does not arise.

Who-you-truly-are is beyond the mind and body. You are pure awareness, which precedes thoughts and emotions. Everything that happens is within the light of awareness, but awareness remains ever-complete and ever-untouched by the happenings of the world. Thus, indifference is the nature of awareness. It is your true nature.

When there is clarity of your indifferent nature, then you can participate in the activities of the world with a kind of detached enthusiasm. You do not have any fixations for outcomes. Whatever you wish for, you may get it, or you may not get it. But you will continue to enthusiastically wish for it, although it doesn’t really matter to you whether or not you get it!

With such detachment, you are not at loggerheads with whatever is. You love and allow whatever is to be as it is. There is no struggle or conflict. Such detachment can only arise from your unshakable conviction in who-you-truly-are.

This can also be called dispassionate passion.

Dispassionate passion is the primal creative force; it is original creative power of the universe! If it were not for this quality of indifference, then there would be no creation. It is such detached interest that brings about the creation of the phenomenal world. If there is even an iota of attachment or fixation in the creative process, then what gets created is limited and not sustainable for long. Attachment to outcomes limits our creative potential. Attachment collapses possibilities from the unseen.

When we lead life with this attitude of indifference to whatever is, it brings forth the qualities of courage and freedom. Whether you are making a business deal or attending a job interview, if you are indifferent to the outcome of the deal or interview, then you experience a freedom of a different kind.

If you are attached to the outcome, then it causes a struggle in an attempt to force a particular outcome. Such struggle involves a forced effort, which can trigger disturbing feelings within. And feelings affect our actions and determine the results.

Whether you win the business deal or you don’t, whether you get selected for the job or you don’t, your faith does not falter when you are detached. Choices and actions that are apt for the given situation effortlessly emerge from this state of indifference.

The best dancers immerse themselves into their art to the point where they do not identify themselves separately as performers of their art; they become one with the performance. When they are dancing on stage, we may see it as a person dancing flawlessly, but to them the only thing on stage is nature taking its course. There is no person. There is no ego.

If only we could live in such spontaneous flow of life; then we wouldn’t be acting for happiness; rather we would be acting from joy!