Attachment (Raga) to Our Ideas About Ourselves

by Nina

Phil and Rita Stuck on Groundhog Day

2.3 avidya asmita raga dvesha abhinevesha klesah

The five afflictions (klesahs) which disturb the equilibrium of consciousness are: ignorance or lack of wisdom, ego, pride of the ego or the sense of ‘I,’ attachment to pleasure, aversion to pain, fear of death and clinging to life. —Yoga Sutras, translation by Edwin Bryant 

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time talking with a young person who is struggling with depression. Of all the things this person told me, one sentence keeps haunting me. In a voice choked with tears, the person said, “I thought I had my life all figured out—and I thought I knew who I was—but now all that is gone.” 

Some time ago I wrote a post The Pains Which Are to Come about the klesahs, the five afflictions that cause human suffering (interestingly, the word means “poison” in Sanskrit). In that post, I concentrated on aversion to pain and fear of death/clinging to life. Today, I thought I’d consider attachment (raga). Here's the yoga sutra that defines attachment:

2.7 Attachment stems from experience of happiness

Edwin Bryant explains this sutra as:

“Attachment is craving for pleasure by one who remembers past experience of pleasure. Ego is the root of attachment just as ignorance is the root of ego. Ignorance and ego cause the deluded mind to associate the self with the latent impressions of past experience of pleasure.” 

Often attachment is described—as it is above—as attachment to pleasure or to things that give us pleasure. Attachment to pleasure causes suffering because we crave more of the same, and we suffer when we can’t get more. Perhaps it was a material object that gave us pleasure, and we end up acquiring more and more of the same thing until we end up overspending or hoarding or perhaps we just can’t afford more and are tortured by cravings. Or perhaps it was a sensory experience that gave us pleasure, such as eating or having sex, both of which can lead to problems if you go overboard with them. Or, perhaps it was an emotional experience. Remember in the movie "Groundhog Day" (yes, that’s one of my all-time favorite movies), when Phil has his first wonderful evening with Rita, the woman he secretly loves, and then he desperately tries to repeat that same night over and over, always failing?

But it seems to me that, like the young man I described above, we can also have profound attachments to the lives we plan for ourselves or the images we have of who we are. That gives us a different kind of pleasure—a sense of security. And losing that can feel devastating. I’m pretty sure that we, as “aging” people, have either all gone through this ourselves or seen it happen to other people. Maybe a marriage we once thought would last forever ends in a divorce. Maybe years of striving for success in a certain job or profession ends in failure. Maybe someone close to you dies unexpectedly, your house burns down, or you develop a chronic illness, and that one event changes your entire life. Maybe you’ve always been the strong one, but now you need help for the first time. Of course, it is not always a negative experience that alters your ideas about your life and yourself—maybe you meet someone or make a discovery that puts you on an entirely unexpected path, and you wonder: how did I get here?

But as yoga sutra 2.3 says, it is “attachment” that causes the suffering, not the loss of pleasure. So it is only our clinging to the life we imagined we would live or the selves we thought we were that is the real cause of our suffering. Otherwise, we could just let go and move on. 

I actually find this observation about the nature of the human mind to be very helpful on its own. I try to bring awareness to my attachment to my fantasies about what my life should be or my beliefs about who I am. Right now I’m in New Jersey, where I didn’t expect to be this month, helping a family member. I’m not sure how long I’ll be here or what will happen next. And the yoga philosophy I described above—my understanding of my own attachment to what I expected my life to be—is helping me let go of the agenda I once had for this time period (not to mention the feeling—how on earth did I ever end up in New Jersey, where I never, ever wanted to live?). But obviously a young person who is feeling for the first time that his whole life—and self—is being destroyed has a much greater challenge. I see so clearly his desperate wish to return to the way things once were, and his stubborn clinging to his old self image, and I was once in the same position myself, many years ago.

So what does Patanjali have to say about all this? After describing the klesahs, including attachment (raga) in detail, Patanjali simply says the following: 

2.11. The states of mind produced by these klesahs are eliminated by meditation. 

However, it seems to me, before you can move on to that step, you need to be ready to admit that attachment IS an affliction. I sometimes think we cling to our attachments in a form of magical thinking, because we feel as if fervently wishing for what we desire will make some kind of magic that will allow us to return to living the life we always imagined or to the self we once believed we were. (Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking described this kind of thinking that she experienced after the sudden death of her husband.) But despite the fact that the movie "Groundhog Day" was magical realism, it was only after Phil truly gave up on escaping the day he kept living over and over in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and somehow making Rita love him back—beginning to truly live his life in Punxsutawney on Groundhog Day—that he was able to wake up the next morning to a brand new day.