Attachment is born out of repeatedly thinking about a person or thing, “This is mine. This is mine,” or “This will make me happy.” You keep having that type of positive chintan (contemplation) about a person or thing, and that creates an attachment. So we create our own attachments.
Again, think of chai (tea). How did you create the attachment to chai? Maybe when you reached a certain age, your parents started letting you drink it, or when you became an adult, you started drinking it on your own. You were not attached to it, but you thought,
“Everybody’s doing it, let me also see.”
And then you got that little feeling,
“Oh yeah, it wakes you up. I like that.”
So you had it a few times and put sugar in it as well, so it tastes sweet. Then you start getting attached to the smell of it. You do not even have to taste it. You smell somebody cooking chai, and before it did not affect you like that. So through using it repeatedly and thinking about it repeatedly, you got attached to that thing. So you created the attachment. The same thing happens with a person.
Your husband or wife, whom you are now married to and so attached to that you think you cannot live without them, or at least that is how you felt when you got married, right? But how did you get that feeling? You did not have that feeling the moment you met them. No. You started thinking, “Oh, this is my husband, this is my wife - mine, mine, mine.” You started doing that chintan over and over again, until finally, in your mind, that deep attachment was built. So we create attachments through repetitive thinking about a thing. By the way, you can also create a negative attachment. We call it hate.
Your colleague who backstabs you at work, and makes you look bad in front of your boss, so you start doing chintan of that person. Now you cannot get them out of your mind. Just like you cannot get the person you love out of your mind, you cannot get the person you hate out of your mind. And how did you create the hate? Hate is just a negative attachment. You created it by repeated chintan in a negative way. And where did love come from? Love is also just a positive attachment, which you created through repeatedly thinking about a person in a positive way.
So we create attachment. That attachment leads to desire. That desire traps us in an endless cycle of suffering in this world. Not only do we suffer in this life, but then, in fulfilling those desires, or trying to, or out of anger when they are unfulfilled. Think of all the different kinds of karm we do: selfish karm, bad karm, and rarely good karm. All of that karm binds us, and then we have to be born in the next life and suffer the consequences of that karm.
So look at how much our desires are causing suffering for us. And we are caught in this cycle of desire because we have attachment. And we have attachment because we keep repeatedly thinking, “This thing is mine, this person is mine, this will give me happiness.”
So the question we are left with is: why do we do that? We do that because we want to be happy. Simple as that. Whoever we identify as someone or something that could make me happy, we start doing chintan about that person or thing. We get attached, and then we desire for them.
