When you are growing in detachment, according to Mukul Vyas, you will become healthier, happier; your life will become a life of joy. Joy is the criterion of all that is good. But, with indifference there is no possibility that joy can grow. In fact, if you have any joy, that will disappear.
If things are going right, and you are moving in the right direction, each moment will bring more joy – as if you are going towards a beautiful garden. The closer you come, the air will be fresher, cooler, more fragrant. Joy is the very stuff existence is made of. So whenever you are moving towards becoming more existential you will be becoming more and more full of joy, delight, for no reason at all. If you are moving into detachment, love will grow, joy will grow, only attachments will drop – because attachments bring misery, bondage, and they destroy your freedom. But if you are becoming indifferent, well indifference is a pseudo-coin. It only looks like detachment. Nothing will be growing in it. You will simply shrink and shrivel.
Beware. Whenever something goes wrong there are indications in your being. Sadness is an indicator, depression is an indicator; joy, celebration also. More songs will happen to you if you are moving towards detachment. You will be dancing more and becoming more loving. Remember, love is not attachment, love knows no attachment, and that which knows attachment is not love. That is possessiveness, domination, clinging, fear, greed – it may be a thousand and one things, but it is not love. In the name of love other things are parading, but on the container the label “love” is stuck. Inside you will find many sorts of things but not love at all.
Watch. If you are attached to a person, are you in love? Or are you afraid of your aloneness, so you cling? Do you use this person so as not to be alone? If you are afraid of your aloneness, you need somebody to distract you. And you want to possess the other person, you want to use the other person as a means for your own ends. To use another person as a means is violence.
Immanuel Kant used to say that to treat a person as a means is the greatest immoral act there is. It is, because when you treat another person as a means – for your gratification, for your sexual desire, for your fear, or for something else – you are reducing the other person to be a thing, you are destroying his or her freedom, you are killing his or her soul.
The soul can grow only in freedom. Love gives freedom. And when you give freedom, you are free, that’s what detachment is. If you enforce bondage on the other, you will be in imprisonment on your own accord. If you bind the other, the other will bind you; if you define the other, the other will define you; if you are trying to possess the other, the other will possess you. Control is not love.
Never treat any person as a means. Treat everybody as an end in himself, in herself – then you are a person of heart. Then you don’t cling, then you are not attached. You love but your love gives freedom – and, when you give freedom to the other, you are free. Only in freedom does the soul grow.