In my last post, “Recalibrating to the Right Brain,” I mentioned that for several months last year I felt an acute sense of heartbreak observing the deterioration of one small but critical part of my father’s mind. At age 90, dad has lost the faculty to recognize the falsehood of claims by scammers that he had won 2.5 million dollars, if only he would pay them $75,000 in “taxes and insurance fees.”
Actually, I experienced all five stages of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief. First there was denial: ‘we can talk dad out of this absurd delusional thinking.’ Then came anger: ‘what’s wrong with the bastard; he has the nerve to throw all his money away?!’ Then came bargaining: ‘Dad, yes, I’ll sign to transfer money into your checking account, provided you use it to pay your actual bills.’ This was quickly followed by the heartache I mentioned. I was rocked by strong feelings of depression over losing the dad I always knew I had, my father with sound judgment. Finally and unexpectedly, I arrived at the fifth stage, acceptance: ‘my dad has a brain problem brought on by ageing and it’s normal for elderly people to have some sort of compromised mental or physical abilities.’
Faced with a problem that causes you heartache, what does it take to reach the stage of acceptance? In a word, it takes the ability to acquire a sense of detachment from the problem. I experienced detachment briefly in early September, while I was still in the throes of the depression stage. It happened when my partner and I got away for four sun-soaked days with two dear friends on the Oregon coast. God blessed us with perfect balmy weather every day, the sunsets were magnificent, and the evening revelry was delightful. Driving down from Seattle for this mini-vacation, I kept thinking, “Oh my God, my father is giving all his money away to criminal con artists for bogus sweepstakes prizes!!!” By the time we drove back, I had acquired a new perspective on the matter. I thought to myself, “I know an elderly person whose mind has become vulnerable to financial fraud, and he just happens to be my father. We’d better protect him from this misfortune.” My pre-acceptance stage proved only to last a few days, but it laid much needed ground work, and I managed to circle back to it about three months later.
How do you achieve the detachment you need to reach Kubler-Ross’ acceptance stage? The answer is both very simple and very difficult: you have to let your ego get out of the way. My ego was dramatizing the situation to the max. Every time I thought about the situation, I imagined my father in the gutter and I pictured myself losing my inheritance. “Woe is me, all is lost,” I kept repeating to myself. Somehow I completely forgot that this had nothing to do with me and everything to do with my father.
Detachment is one of the most significant concepts in Eastern religion and philosophy. At the same time, it is one of the most difficult for Westerners to understand and accept. It seems to us that detachment goes against the principle of compassion to the point of being anti-life. It seems to be a doctrine dictating that we must not allow ourselves to love our family members and friends; that we must distance ourselves from them as much as possible. In a way, this understanding is exactly correct: after all, Siddhartha did walk away from his beloved wife and children and renounce them in order to become Buddha. Similarly, in India, many vagabond beggars stray away from social entanglements to avoid becoming attached to anyone.
But in a more modern sense, detachment can mean learning to conduct one’s life effectively by not allowing one’s ego to sabotage right action. Buddhist monks, nuns and great Buddhist leaders like Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron show us a way to be compassionate to others without obsessing over the bonds that attach us to them, whether they are bonds of family, business or friendship. Which of my own perceptions about my dad was the most compassionate: the anxiety-ridden emotion, “Oh my God, he’s giving all his money away!” or the more detached awareness, “I know an elderly person who has been scammed. He is my father and I need to help him.” An attitude of detachment can actually promote compassion, whereas an over-wrought emotional entanglement can lead to attacking the other person, which is the opposite of compassion.
In Chapter 6 of Joseph Campbell’s book, “Myths to Live By,” there is a wonderful passage that describes how acquiring a sense of detachment can be analogous to conscious role-playing, where one learns to play the role of father or son or any other human part, without forgetting that the role is simply a necessary tool of action and not a fundamental or permanent attribute of your soul:
“There is a curious, extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as ‘play language,’ asobase kotoba, whereby, instead of saying to a person, for example, ‘I see that you have come to Tokyo,’ one would express the observation by saying, ‘I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo’ – the idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game. He is able to enter into life as one would enter into a game, freely and with ease. And this idea is carried even so far that instead of saying to a person, ‘I hear that your father has died,’ you would say, rather, ‘I hear that your father has played at dying.’ And now, I submit that this is truly a noble, really glorious way to approach life. What has to be done is attacked with such a will that in the performance one is literally ‘in play.’”
This is how acquiring a sense of detachment can help us in modern life: if we can let our ego get out of the way, we can more clearly see the role we need to play to effect compassionate action. In a game of tennis, the ego or the brain never hits the ball over the net; the racquet in the hand on the arm in the shoulder socket always does.
Walking the beach at Oceanside, Oregon helped me find a sense of detachment.
Bird of Spirit 