The Bhagavad Gita is the most famous segment of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. It is a dialogue between Arjuna, a warrior prince and a great archer, and Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu in disguise as Arjuna’s chariot driver. 

The conversation takes place before a climactic battle. The entire epic story of the Mahabharata concerns the conflict between the Pandavas– Arjuna and his brothers– and other members of their extended family. At the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita, the lines of battle have been drawn up. Arjuna and his brothers are about to go into war against their own relatives. Arjuna, contemplating this, is filled with guilt and pity. He throws down his bow and refuses to fight. 

Krishna reveals his divinity to Arjuna, and enlightens Arjuna through his explanations of the workings of the universe, and most specifically by revealing Karma Yoga, or the yoga of action. Krishna explains that renouncing worldly activity and becoming an ascetic hermit is not the only way to attain moksha, which means spiritual liberation. Liberation can be achieved while remaining engaged in worldly affairs, through the practice of non-attachment. 

Non-attachment is the recognition of the impermanence of all things, and the release of one’s desire for things to be unchanging. Most importantly, in the case of Karma yoga, it is the ability to release the results of one’s actions. Krishna says:

“But when a man has found delight and satisfaction and peace in the Atman (the divine Self), then he is no longer obliged to perform any kind of action. He has nothing to gain in this world by action, and nothing to lose by refraining from action. He is independent of everybody and everything. Do your duty, always; but without attachment. That is how a man reaches the ultimate Truth; by working without anxiety about results.”

–Bhagavad Gita translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, pgs. 46-47

I used to have big problems with the Bhagavad Gita. Back when I was a baby pacifist, I thought Arjuna should have stuck to his guns and refused to fight his family, no matter what Krishna told him. I also have previously resisted the concept of non-attachment. I wanted a passionate engagement in life. I wanted to love and hate and feel, to fully experience each and every moment. 

But a funny thing happened to me recently. It coincided with my reading of the Bhagavad Gita, as well as my increasingly serious Yoga practice, several workings of ritual magic, and some drastic improvements in my mental health. I cannot attribute this change to any one factor. But no matter what brought it on– I achieved non-attachment. 

It wasn’t at all what I expected. 

“Non-attachment is not detachment,” my yoga teacher Ros told me. It turns out she is right. 

Non-attachment is not dissociation. It is not dispassion. It is not a lack of caring or the absence of love. It is not an emotionless state. And, as Krishna explained to Arjuna, it is not inaction or passivity. What it is, as best as I can explain, is… a quiet strength. An assurance. An acceptance of the changing nature of things. Seeing through illusions, neurosis, and the lies my mentally ill brain tells me. 

Aleister Crowley channeled these words in The Book of the Law: “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is all ways perfect.” I’ve always liked that line, but now I think I really understand it. It echoes the Gita– probably not coincidentally, Crowley definitely read it in some translation. 

“You can only do what you can, and leave the rest in God’s hands,” my twelve-step sponsors have always told me. “You can only control your own actions. Not the outcome. Certainly not other people’s reactions.” 

Will is closely related to action. It is the power, the desire, behind action. So how can you have a powerful will that motivates you to act, and yet not be attached to the outcome? In trying to answer this question, I finally understood why Arjuna is an archer. The archer takes careful aim. He draws the bowstring back with all his might. The drawing back of the bowstring and the aiming of the bow is will. The release is action. But once action is taken, once he lets the arrow fly, the results are literally out of his hands. He may hit his target. Or the enemy may dodge out of the way. Or an innocent bystander may wander into his arrow’s path. Or a powerful gust of wind may come up and blow it off course. 

All actions are like this. We can aim at our goals, we can focus on them with all our hearts and souls. We can plot a trajectory with skill and wisdom. But once action is taken, once the arrow flies, the results are no longer up to us. And all the anxiety in the world will not change that. 

Non-attachment, then, is letting the arrow fly. It’s letting our dreams and aspirations take off and then fall where they may. It is a whole-hearted acceptance that we can only do so much, that outcomes are not in our control. 

While the fact that Arjuna is an archer is very profound, I think it’s also fascinating that Krishna is a charioteer. The tarot card The Chariot represents the effective harnessing of will and drive, and yet it portrays a charioteer who drives without reins. The lack of reins, symbolizing the non-attachment of the driver, is paradoxically what gives his will its momentum, its effectiveness, its power. 

Non-attachment is a surrender that makes you more powerful. Ultimately, what non-attachment gives you is the freedom to truly make choices. How? Let me try to explain.

Lucifer as the serpent of Eden gives us the fruit that makes us ‘as gods, knowing good and evil.’ He introduces us to the full, truthful experience of the universe– right and wrong, pleasure and pain, life and death. The illusion that everything is safe and orderly and under God’s control is shattered. When we eat the fruit of knowledge, we accept reality, and in doing so, become freed from illusions, and therefore free to choose. 

Good and evil. We will know it all. We will experience it all. And we will commit both good and evil in our lives. All of this is part of what the Serpent is telling us. And he is telling us that when we know both good and evil, we may choose between them freely, with open eyes. 

My experience of non-attachment has manifested as a new freedom from the scripts written by my traumas and mental illnesses. I have realized that I actually don’t have to do anything unless I choose to. Sometimes the choice is very obvious– yes, I will work to earn money because, as much as capitalism sucks, I want to stay alive. There are constraints on our choices, but I have realized there are fewer constraints than I thought. I don’t have to exhaust myself in people-pleasing. I don’t have to try to control and micro-manage others. I can just make decisions about my own actions based on what truly matters to me, and if people are disappointed or upset, that may not actually be my problem. 

I am not advocating flagrantly being an asshole, or not considering how my actions affect others. I am talking about decisions made freely, without a false sense of pressure. Without guilt, anxiety, and neurosis running the show. Acting not from obligation or a sense of convention, but based purely on what I deeply feel is right and important. 

When I first achieved non-attachment I realized that I had not truly chosen to do all the worst things I have ever done. When I look back at my life, I realize that the times when I have hurt others worse have almost all been in moments of flailing in fear, in rage. Moments of replaying past traumas and projecting them onto innocent people. That’s not an excuse. It’s not an abdication of responsibility. Quite the opposite. I realized, with a shock, that I would actually feel better and cleaner about those harms I had committed if I had at least chosen them. “I didn’t mean to” no longer feels like an excuse. “I didn’t mean to” scares me much more than meaning to!  After all, if you didn’t mean to do harm, it’s much harder to figure out how to stop! 

I wasn’t making true choices. I would frankly rather choose evil than commit it unconsciously, because at least that would mean I was free to choose good.

Non-attachment gives me back that choice. 

Non-attachment and compassion are often mentioned in the same breath, especially within Buddhism. They are not contradictory. In fact, a certain degree of non-attachment actually facilitates empathy, because it frees us from anxiety about what other people will think of us, and lets us focus on them without ego-driven self-interest about how we come across. 

I feel like in order to explain this fully, I will have to give an example. 

Let’s say your friend and chariot-driver Krishna invited you, Arjuna, to come hang out. But you, Arjuna, have a bad cold. You feel too guilty to cancel and are worried that Krishna will think you are a flake, so you go hang out anyway. In fact, Krishna cares about you and would much rather you take care of yourself. His divinity prevents him from catching your cold in spite of his incarnate state, but he doesn’t enjoy watching you cough and sneeze and snot everywhere. In your efforts to people-please and self-deny, you have successfully lost sight of what your friend would actually prefer. Instead of being truly considerate of him, you are preoccupied by trying to control what he thinks of you and how he feels about you, which, of course, are out of your hands. 

With non-attachment, you would be able to simply cancel on Krishna because that is clearly the sensible thing to do, and let what he feels about it be his problem. 

Another example: you have an important presentation to give tomorrow. You have prepared for it to the best of your ability. It is now bedtime. You try to sleep but you cannot because you are so anxious about the presentation. Of course your anxiety does nothing to improve the outcome. In fact, it keeps you awake all night. Your presentation goes extremely poorly because, even though you were prepared, you did not sleep. 

Non-attachment is the ability to prepare, say to yourself “I have done all I can” and then just forget about it until tomorrow, because you realize that worrying about things is useless and does not positively influence reality. Yet we all do this all the time! We often feel guilty if we don’t worry and agonize! It’s almost as if we truly believe that our anxiety will protect us and help things work out for the best. 

As should be clear from this example, sometimes non-attachment cannot be achieved through meditation and spiritual work alone. Sometimes appropriate psychiatric medication is also required. 

Non-attachment is fundamentally a recognition of what one does and does not control. The AA serenity prayer goes “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” We cannot control other people. We cannot control time and aging and death and bad luck. We can only control our own actions, and sometimes not even that. When we are caught up in loops of trauma and anxiety and obligation– in short, in negative attachment– we are driven by those loops, not truly able to make our own choices. We react. We do not act. Non-attachment in Karma yoga is a pure focus on what we do control. The drawing back of the bowstring. The aiming of the arrow. The moment of release. 

Non-attachment is sometimes explained as releasing impermanent things. It is poorly understood as refusing to love people who will age and die, refusing to invest in a life that will end. Krishna tells Arjuna to be indifferent to both pleasure and pain, but non-attachment does not feel like indifference to me. It is the embrace of impermanence. It is the love of change and chaos. Pain is accepted as the price of pleasure. Pain is revered as part of movement, growth, entropy, change, and all the other things that make existence precious and life worth living. 

Nietzsche has a concept called eternal recurrence. It started as a thought experiment, articulated in section 341 of his (hilariously named) book The Gay Science: 

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence” … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

Nietzsche’s challenge is to embrace the good in one’s life so fully, so passionately, that you would also embrace the bad just to experience the good again. This might seem like the opposite of non-attachment– it might appear to be radical attachment– but it works out to the same thing, which is complete acceptance of existence as it is. This acceptance is not passive. It’s not an excuse to abandon the struggle, or to stop trying to make the world a better place. No, it’s about taking both our successes and our failures, our agonies and our ecstasies, as they come. Loving life so completely that we even come to terms with the bad in it. 

I cannot claim to have remained in a perfect state of non-attachment since having this revelation. It has, however, become a baseline for me. A safe home to return to. When I find myself growing agitated or feel my thoughts spinning out of control, I take a deep breath and ask myself a few questions:

Am I trying to control outcomes or other people?

Am I clinging to something I need to release?

Am I doing this thing right now because I truly choose to do so, or am I running on autopilot, letting myself be controlled by anxiety, obligation, and fear of what others will think of me?

Am I doing what I think is right, or only what will cause other people to think I am a good person?

Is this my true will?

Is my authentic self making a choice, or is trauma taking the reins?

Can I release the result of this action?

Can I accept this painful moment as part of a life that has also included great joy?

Like most spiritual revelations, this cannot be transmitted merely by talking about it. I’d heard about non-attachment for years before it clicked for me. And when it came to me it was as my own version of it, one deeply influenced by questions of will and choice and passion and intensity of experience, all things that are important to me. It’s not something that can be explained, it has to be felt. 

I do not preach non-attachment. I am not sure it is something that everyone needs. I don’t really believe in universal spiritual principles. But I do pray for you all, on this day, that you find some version of the clarity and freedom that Arjuna and his arrows have given me.