Dear comforteaglesteve,

“I have a deeeeep seated attachment to hope. I need it like a shield to keep going. I am suffering without it.”

In reality you are suffering not without it but because of it.

In fact this situation has come to you to remove your suffering, ultimately to cleanse your soul, which can only happen when you are free of attachments.

As soon as you are free of any attachment (even of hope), you will not need hope for anything, as things will keep on happening and changing by itself. Even if something doesn’t happen as expected, it doesn’t matter anymore because you are internally free. Either ways you are free. And not to forget about the impermanent nature of all things in life. How futile it is to hold onto something that is not permanent in life.

Several spiritual masters and teachings have pointed out about attachments and it being the root cause of all suffering.

Below are some useful resources that point the same.

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How to Free Yourself from the Ego:

The ego is present in all of our attachments. We can be attached to wealth, possessions, a person, a group, our job, our intelligence, even our sense of spiritual attainment.

Whenever we drop one attachment, the ego will very quickly find another. The truth is, we have numerous attachments engaged at any given time. The ego feeds on attachments and is always on the look out for some new thing, person or achievement to identify with and attach itself to.

Of course, it is the goal of each of us to be free of the ego. If you are reading this, you are a person who is consciously seeking to be liberated from the prison of the ego.

How do we free ourselves from the ego?

One way we approach this is to work away on the attachments and identifications. We let go of this attachment and that attachment. We discover everything we’re identified with and work to dis-identify with those things. This is a slow process, and by itself it will take a long time to attain. But it is a vital part of the awakening process, and if you seek every day to be less attached and less identified, it will immediately begin to improve the quality of your life and consciousness.

There is another, more easy, way to free ourselves from the ego: presence.

The present moment is the easiest exit point out of the ego. The ego can’t co-exist with presence. The ego only lives in past and future. When you are present in this moment, there is no past or future, there is only now.

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“The root of suffering is attachment” ~Buddha

“You only lose what you cling to” ~Buddha

“To be free from suffering free yourself from attachments” ~Buddha

“From attachment comes grief, from attachment comes fear; he who is free from attachment knows neither grief not fear” ~Buddha

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Buddha’s Second Noble Truth – The origin of suffering is attachment

The second noble truth tells us that the root of all suffering is attachment. To avoid suffering, we need to understand what causes suffering and then weeding out these causes from our lives.

According to Buddha, the basic cause of suffering is “the attachment to the desire to have (craving) and the desire not to have (aversion)”.

All of us have desires and cravings. Since we cannot satisfy ALL our desires and cravings, we get disturbed and angry, which is but another manifestation of suffering.

The same holds good for people who are over ambitious and seek too much. As they achieve what they desire, they get lustful and want more of it. And so the vicious circle continues.

The other problem pointed out by Buddha here, which is very pertinent, is that denying desire (or depriving oneself) is like denying life itself. A person, he said, has to rise above attachments and for that, he need not deprive himself. The problem arises when he does not know where to put an end to his desires. And when he yields into his desires, he becomes a slave to them.

Best Wishes,
VJ