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SyndicateDetachment and the Impossible
By Robert Ringer - Monday, March 15, 2010
By Robert Ringer
When you’re in a seemingly impossible situation, one of the most important but least understood tools you can employ to turn things around is detachment. There are many things from which you can detach yourself, and one of the most important is the habit of judging people, actions, and circumstances as being right or wrong, good or bad.
As Deepak Chopra says in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, when you are constantly classifying, labeling, and evaluating, you “create a lot of turbulence in your internal dialogue.” The more internal bickering that takes place, the less time and room (in your mind) you have for constructive thinking.
Worry, irrelevant thoughts, and fears only add to this internal bickering. All of these are abstracts from which you should make a conscious effort to detach yourself. Even more important is the necessity to detach yourself from needing the approval of others. When you are attached to peer approval, you tend to make bad decisions.
Then there is the pain and discomfort of your present situation. The more you struggle against the unpleasant circumstances of the moment, the more time and energy you waste. It’s okay to want things to get better down the road, but don’t waste time and energy wishing things were different than they are right now.
Accepting your present situation means detaching yourself from the pain it is causing you. Philosophically, you should learn to accept pain as a normal part of life. Which means, paradoxically, that the best way to eliminate pain is to not try to eliminate it. The more you fight pain, the more it is likely to persist.
Above all, learn to detach yourself from specific results. Practice the art of being flexible. Understand that circumstances constantly change and that things rarely work out precisely as planned. The results you end up with may be much different from the results you were after, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be less satisfying. If you are too attached to a specific result, it shuts down your creativity.
Your mind-set should be: “I won’t die if things don’t work out as planned, so I’ll just step back and let the Cosmic Ether work things out.” As with peer approval, when you are too attached to a specific result, you have a tendency to force decisions, and forced decisions are most often bad decisions.
All this doesn’t mean you should permanently resign yourself to the circumstances of your currently bad situation. Nor does it mean that you should give up your desire or intention for a specific result. What you should give up is your attachment to that result. Or, as Chopra puts it, you should “accept the present and intend the future.”
When you become adept at detachment – from pain, from evaluating and classifying everything that crosses your path, from precise results – it gives you the time, energy, and mental clarity to focus on the single most important activity for overcoming an impossibly bad situation: exploiting opportunities.
What opportunities? The opportunities that are part and parcel of every “impossible” situation. Based on personal experience, I am convinced that the greatest opportunities lie in the eye of the storm – at the very center of your worst problems.
Use your will to detach yourself from your impossible situation and, instead, spend your time cultivating the opportunities it has brought into your life – keeping in mind that such opportunities may be heavily camouflaged.
Thus, achieving sainthood is not the motivation for becoming detached. The only sound motivation for becoming detached is rational self-interest – the realization that if you keep your mind as clear as possible, you will have more time and clarity to concentrate on exploiting new opportunities.
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ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author and host of the highly acclaimed Liberty Education Interview Series, which features interviews with top political, economic, and social leaders. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, The Lars Larson Show, ABC Nightline, and The Charlie Rose Show, and has been the subject of feature articles in such major publications as Time, People, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Barron's, and The New York Times.
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5 Responses to “Detachment and the Impossible”
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I presume you’re quoting the Deepak Chopa that wrote this, and much else on this subject:
Obama and The Palin Effect
From: Deepak Chopra | Posted: Friday, September 5th, 2008
Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin’s pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.
She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other.” For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don’t want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.)
I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin’s message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.
Look at what she stands for:
~ Small town values — a denial of America’s global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.
~ Ignorance of world affairs — a repudiation of the need to repair America’s image abroad.
~ Family values — a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don’t need to be heeded.
~ Rigid stands on guns and abortion — a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
~ Patriotism — the usual fallback in a failed war.
~ “Reform” — an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn’t fit your ideology.
~ Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from “us” pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of “I’m all right, Jack,” and “Why change? Everything’s OK as it is.” The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.
Obama’s call for higher ideals in politics can’t be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow — we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.
I especially like this quote: ”I won’t die if things don’t work out as planned, so I’ll just step back and let the Cosmic Ether work things out.” I am at the stage of letting the Cosmic Ether work things out. We can try all we want but if we are not aligned with the Cosmic Ether very little success will result.
The key is how to find out what the Cosmic Ether is working and align ourselves to it. If you know how to align with the Cosmic Ether please let me know. How do you find out if something works? Try it!
I know this isn’t directly pertinent to this posting, but it’s an item that I think you’d like to read.
http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/general/instead-of-having-china-finance-the-middle-east-wars-usa-should-have-china-fight-them.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+martinvarsavsky%2Fenglish+%28Martin+Varsavsky+|+English%29&utm_content=Netvibes
Robert,
Kudos! A well stated observation and a valuable insight into the human condition with the rational solution for solving many of life’s problems.
The first step is an objective and accurate appraisal of “what is” and after the problem is clearly defined, to state the causes of the problem and then address the causes and NOT the symptoms. We have a very bad habit in America of addressing symptoms due to the fact that addressing symptoms puts off the hard choices. Addressing symptoms is nothing more than a palliative and though that might lessen the degree of pain in the short term, it does nothing to address and reverse the progression of the disharmony and dysfunction in the systemic disease killing the “patient”.
A clear objective statement and definition of the CAUSE creating the dysfunction and disharmony, and then the disciplined application of the efficacious cure to reverse and alleviate the energies creating the disharmony in the system, is the only correct treatment. Otherwise, treating symptoms exclusively will lead to an eventual complete breakdown of the entire system, when the system cannot maintain basic life supporting homeostasis, whether that system be medical, political, social, etc.
The reason for achieving detachment should be solely from the perspective and philosophical attitude of leading an intelligent and self disciplined life leading to lowered stress levels resulting to more consistent contentment and enjoyment.
In my opinion, Mr. Ringer’s excellent advice is priceless, and I get his point about “Detachment.”
On the other hand, that snake, Deepak Chopra, is somebody that mixes venom with truth in lethal doses. I’m sure all the progressive, new age, delusional types drink until drunk from all the half-truths of that progressivist swami.
Relentlessness, endurance, work ethics, creativity, salesmanship, and gaining the advantage through attrition are just a few of the factors that are worth so much more than Deepak Chopra’s over-intellectualized tripe.
I’ve been in some bad situations and I’ll tell you what works in simple everyday terms: Man-up, get off your butt, and get busy. Cut costs, do without, and save money. Then—and this is the most important and difficult part— figure out a plan whereby you won’t spend your life working for mere wages and becoming somebody’s rent-a-slave.