Attachment to self

Just cycled from Reading to Sevenoaks in the snow yesterday - it was exciting and beautiful and not as cold and miserable as I at first anticipated. Only took 7 hours this time and as the snow fell more deeply the monstrous car creatures were slowed and almost brought to a halt - peaceful parity for a while.

Somewhere along the way I saw more clearly an aspect of anatta.

We are each very concerned about ourselves. We take decisions based upon ourselves and when things go wrong we batten down the hatches and withdraw into ourselves. Faced with danger we protect ourselves.

This means that we withdraw into our bodies and protect those bodies with walls against the outside world. We make decisions to ensure the logevity of our bodies. In a metaphysical sense we envisage a "can't see" version of our "can see" body that hides inside the body called the soul or at least the "self" for meta-materialists. A ghostly homunculus that enacts in hiding the physical protection we seek for our bodies.

All is secure in fortress us until we become infatuated or fall in love. Then a very odd thing happens, where once we sort to protect ourselves we find ourselves wanting to protect a self that lies outside our body! This state can become so extreme that we will even sacrifice this body for that body which we love! A complete change of places of our attachment.

Such an experience teaches us in very definite terms that the attachment we have to "this body" what we call "our body" is arbitrary and we can have the same attachment for anything we chose either here or there, either connected to me or afar from me!

This separates one important aspect of our notion of self: our attachment to it. Irrespective of the metaphysics of self there is no logic as to why we should chose to attach to "our" self rather than another self.

There is no reason then to look out for ourselves more than for other people. The most common justification is that if you don't look out for yourself then who else is, but this is a self fulfilling idea since it is only true when everyone thinks like that. In a society of people who behave rationally to the prisoners dilemma (i.e. not American society) then we can look out for whoever we chose quite rationally.

So forgetting the metaphysics of self for present, we can conclude that whatever they are we still have a choice whether to attach to ourself or other people, neither or both, which is sufficient to debunk the materialist immoral attitude and show the way to true moral liberation.