What a Car can tell you!
Attachments are almost invisible to the naked eye!
"Your Toyota Tundra doesn't have as much towing power as my Chevy Silverado" Paul said. "That is your opinion Paul, but I have driven a Toyota for 20 years and I love it, I will drive nothing else," Peter replied.
How often do we hear conversations like this? We can replace the topic of cars to: fashion, place we live, what we eat, hobbies basically to everything we have an attachment to. Our personal attachment to a product, experience or family connection determines how we function in life.
Since birth we subconsciously make decisions with our five senses: smell, touch, taste, what we see and hear. It is like a library with file cabinets, every experience get filed and when something happens we go to the cabinet and look if we already experienced it and what our response to it was. This includes the whole range of emotions from happiness to grief. When we are talking about our "car", the file cabinet gets opened and all the attachments we have around that topic come to the surface; and get used in the conversation.
Attachments get created through our personal experience; however family and society expectations have a huge influence on our attachments.
What can our "car" tells us then? In the way we talk about it, it becomes clear what kind of attachments we have towards it. Look at the scenarios below.
We are convinced that the brand we use is the best, and defend this brand to no end.
There is no better way of doing "this".(driving, painting, computer skills, ECT)
We don't want to try out something different, because we already know that it is not going to work.
Or:
We acknowledge that the brand we use works for our purpose
What and how we are doing things works for us.
We are not stuck on one way of thinking and are open for suggestions and feedback.
Bottom line is: the way we go through life is formed by the file-cabinet we keep and the attachments we have.
In life it doesn't matter if you "drive" a " Toyota Tundra, Chevy Silverado or an Porsche", they all do the same basic thing; they bring you from A to B. I do recognize that a "car" is a status symbol for a lot of people; however that brings us again back to what kind of attachments we have in the file-cabinet.
It is our personal file-cabinet that is important in our lives, nevertheless it is also important to clean out this cabinet from time to time, and throw out the old believes and attachments that are not working for us anymore.
"The root of suffering is attachments" by Budda
What are your thoughts on Budda's statement?
