NooSchool Blog – Charles Winborne

Appropriation and Detachment, continued:

Two sets of principles are to be found controlling human life:

• the selfish and the unselfish,
• the individual good and the group good,
• the objective goal and the subjective goal,
• the material incentive and the spiritual impulse,
• national patriotism and the world ideal,
• separative religious belief and the federation of religions,
• and all the many massed dualities which simply indicate the realism of people who are personalities (integrated and separative) or of souls (aligned and group-conscious).

Stages of Detachment:

• dispassion
• discrimination
• detachment

Mature Stages of Detachment:

• The more-mature individual learns to relinquish the fruits or gains of service and learns to serve without attachment to results, to means, to persons or to praise.
• All that has been acquired through age-long struggle and strife, through pain and pleasure, through disaster and satisfied desire, and all that the wheel of life, which has turned ceaselessly, has brought into the possession of the soul – All has to be relinquished. (Here, one becomes increasingly disinterested in the means and life of one’s historic Persona).
• Capacity to relinquish not only its tie and its gain through contact with the personal self, but it has most definitely to relinquish its tie with other personal selves. Capacity to know and to meet other people only on the plane of the soul–or, if you will–on the plane of the universal, on vision, beauty, goodness, and truth. This is especially difficult for husbands and wives, devotees, co-workers, and parent relationships with respect to their children as “other personal selves.”
  • Capacity to relinquish or sacrifice the age-old tendency to criticize and adjust another’s work, and thus preserve the inner group integrity.
  • Capacity to relinquish or sacrifice the sense of responsibility for the actions of others, and particularly of co-workers. See that your own activity measures up to theirs, and in the joy of struggle and on the way of service the differences will disappear and the general good will be achieved.
  • Capacity to relinquish the pride of mind which sees its way and its interpretations to be correct and true, and others’ false and wrong. This is the way of separation.