The misdirected craving for inner fulfillment becomes external attachment || Acharya Prashant (2015)

Question: In one of your videos you say that attachment is the result of space and time. But, often in a situation, if somebody talks to us politely or sweetly, we tend to want to spend more time with that person. On the contrary, if somebody abuses me or throws harsh words on me, I won’t like to sit with him even if he is close to me, even if I have spent lot of time with him. So how is it attachment in this case?

Speaker: See, attachment like everything else, is in the mind. When somebody is nice and polite to you, when somebody is not hurting you, you remember him. You remember him nicely. You will probably call him a ‘friend’. And when somebody is hurtful or abrasive, then too you remember him. Now, you probably remember him as a villain, as an enemy, as somebody to be avoided, right? But in either case, you do remember him. What is common between friends and enemies? You have thoughts about them. You remember both of them, right? You are not indifferent to either of them, and this is attachment. This is attachment.

What is the real meaning of attachment? Understand this.

Deep within us there is a desire to know ‘who we are’. We want to say, “I am” and then we stop there, awkwardly, we don’t know what to say, there is a blank. This ‘I am’ desperately wants to get attached to something, so that the sentence may be completed. Do you see that, this is a very awkward blank; ‘I am’, and then you can’t proceed any further. Attachment is the urge to fill in this blank; so that the sentence may be completed.