We should all always practice abstinence from attribution — that is, from tracing events back to what we take to be their causes. However, abstaining from such attribution is no easy thing to do.
After all, attributions are like food: We can’t do without them. What is more, they are also like sex: No one wants to do without them. Accordingly, the no usage criterion for abstinence — the criterion that applies, for example, to recovered alcoholics who maintain continuing abstinence from alcohol, never consuming it again after they once sober up — cannot be applied to abstinence from attributions.
In what, then, does the latter sort of abstinence, the sort we should all always practice toward attributions, consist?
It consists in refraining from investing oneself in one’s attributions, whatever they may concern. Put positively, it consists in maintaining neutrality towards all the attributions we make, regardless of their content.
We cannot stop ourselves from making attributions: we make them incessantly. Furthermore, if we made no attributions we would have no science or technology, nor for that matter any art or religion. In fact, without attributions we would not even be able to accomplish daily tasks of the simplest sorts. From infancy, a large part of individual human mental development is the process whereby we first learn to make attributions (to connect things together as cause and effect), and then go on to learn more and more sophisticated strings of attributions. A large part of societal progress also occurs in much the same way. Thus, it would be suicidal of us, both individually and collectively, to attempt simply to stop making attributions, even if we could.
We can’t. All that anyone needs to do to become convinced that we can’t is to try. Even to be able to keep our minds free of attributions for a moment or two is an incredibly difficult task. Devotees of any of the many forms of meditation—from Zen breath counting, to the Hindu use of mantras, to contemporary Christian “Centering Prayer”—may literally practice meditation for years before they can detect any significant diminution of mental attributive activity. Nor does it ever cease altogether, except for relatively brief periods followed by a return to everyday consciousness, which is replete with attributions.
So we cannot completely stop making attributions even if we wanted to, which we don’t. Fortunately, however, we don’t have to.
In order to free ourselves from addiction to attributions we do not have to give them up altogether, any more than the food addict needs to give up eating or the sex addict needs to give up sex. Rather, we must learn to relate to our attributions differently, just as the food addict must learn to relate to food differently, the sex addict to sex differently.
We must learn, in effect, not to care about our attributions. We must learn a healthy, positive indifference toward them. Once we learn such indifference, we can just let our minds go right on attributing in even the wildest ways, since our attributions will have lost their power over us. We will be free in relationship to them, taking them or leaving them alone as the situation requires of us. We will be just like the recovered food addict who is free in relationship to food, having learned how to eat naturally, taking food when hungry and leaving it alone otherwise.
Shunryū Suzuki was a Japanese Zen master teacher (or “Roshi”) who came to the United States in the late 1950s and stayed to found the Zen Center in San Francisco. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York: Weatherhill, 1970), which has become a classic, he tells a parable of how to deal with a sheep or a cow. What he says applies especially to unruly sheep or cattle, we might add. “To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow,” writes Suzuki, “is the way to control him” (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, page 32).
Shunryū Suzuki
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There is nothing new in what Suzuki says. In fact, it is an ancient insight. The same insight is repeated throughout history, in one spiritual tradition after another, with one formulation or another.
So, for example, we can take the case of Taoism, an ancient, indigenous Chinese religion. The central Taoist idea for escaping universal human bondage is to practice the “way” (the meaning of the term tao) of what is called wu-wei. That means “nonaction” or “not-doing.” However, Taoist nonaction is not to be confused with simple Western inaction. Indeed, it is perfectly compatible with a high degree of “action” in the ordinary Western sense. It is not a matter of passivity or quiescence. Rather, it is a matter of not investing oneself in one’s action, and through that investment giving one’s very own action power over oneself.
The same basic idea is familiar, as we have already seen with Suzuki, from Zen Buddhism. In its encounter with Buddhism (brought into China from India), Taoism helped to form Zen; in the latter, too, the practice of “nonaction” is central. If anything, in Buddhism in general, whether Zen or not, the enslaving role of what we are here calling “attributions” receives even greater emphasis than it does in Taoism. According to basic Buddhist doctrine, the three ultimate sources of universal bondage are desire (or attraction), hatred (or aversion), and ignorance. It is nothing but the interplay of those three that gives rise, in fact, to the whole of what is called Samsara, the ever spinning wheel of worldly or phenomenal being. Ultimately, Samsara is nothing but a gigantic illusion created by that interplay—an illusion in which we find ourselves trapped without any apparent way out. If we are ever to escape, we must first come to an experience of “enlightenment” in which we see through the illusion. Then we must practice a rigorous discipline of moment-by-moment “mindfulness” in which we detach from the continuous stream of our experience—that is, in which, once again, we deliberately hold back from investing ourselves in that experience, thereby feeding our desire, hatred, and ignorance. Only in that way can we ever attain liberation.
From Hinduism, the Bhagavat Gita tells the story of the warrior Arjuna and the god Krishna, who has incarnated as Arjuna’s charioteer and servant. Pausing before the beginning of a monumental battle between opposing forces of the same divided family, Arjuna repents of his own profession as a warrior and is struck by a disabling lethargy. In a poetic dialogue Krishna eventually convinces Arjuna that he must go ahead and join the battle, in accordance with his duty as a warrior. He must even be willing to kill and wound beloved members of his own extended family, since that is what the moment requires of him in his station in life. But he must do so with complete detachment, if he is to avoid acquiring any negative karma (inevitable moral consequences, to the agent himself or herself, of any kind of action: a debt that must eventually be paid, if not in this life, then in some subsequent incarnation). He must act as though he were not acting — that is (once again), act without investing himself in his actions through his own attributions. In that way, his actions will attain a purity of motivation, or, more precisely, a purity from motivation. That is, they will be free of the self-centeredness that otherwise sneaks into even the most apparently altruistic actions, introducing a foreign particle into the underlying altruistic intent of the action, a particle that adulterates the whole no less surely than a little bit of vinegar will sour a cup of milk. Only Krishna’s way of completely disinterested action escapes such adulteration—and with it, the karma that would otherwise inevitably accrue.
Especially in the Sufi tradition, Islam contains similar ideas. So does Christianity. With regard to the latter, it is above all in Christian monasticism and mysticism that the necessity of practicing detachment, to use one term for it, is often emphasized.
As codified by St. Basil the Great in his rules for monastic life, by which Eastern Orthodox monasticism is still governed, and by St. Benedict for Western Christianity, the monastic life has been carefully organized constantly to impel monks in the same direction of divesting themselves of their attachments. Whether living in community or in solitude, monks throughout the centuries have striven toward that same goal. From Evagrius of Pontus (345-399 CE), who had a lasting influence on both Latin and Orthodox Christian monastic thought and who borrowed from the Greek Stoics the idea of apatheia or freedom from the passions to Thomas Merton in the 20th century, Christian monks have called for detachment as the way to spiritual perfection.
From Origen to Meister Eckhart, from St. Teresa of Avila to St. Therese of Lisieux, from the anonymous author of the 14th century Cloud of Unknowing to Edith Stein in the 20th, Christian mystics, whether monks or not, have done the same.
We all should follow such paths, choosing whichever tradition is appropriate to us
Meister Eckhardt
NOTE TO READERS: The preceding post is a slightly revised version of a section in the penultimate chapter of my book Addiction and Responsibility—which book may be purchased in the “Store” at the top of this blog site. Also, after this post I am taking my usual holiday break. My next post will not be until Monday, January 13, 2025.