The Law of Detachment – Rev. Darrell Jones
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
The Law of Detachment can be confusing. Oftentimes it gets interpreted as the law of passivity, complacency or do nothingness. When embracing the Law of Detachment, we still act, choose and do, but there is an agility and flexibility with life that the Law of Detachment promotes. Join us this week as we explore the divine balance of desire and detachment to experience greater success in our lives.
SUMMARY
- Detachment is about releasing attachment to outcomes while still maintaining intention and desire. It’s about embracing uncertainty and allowing for transformation.
- Detachment is not about passivity or complacency, but rather cultivating flexibility and agility in our approach to life’s challenges.
- Detachment involves a daily practice of accepting what is, releasing our stories and judgments, and opening ourselves to the possibilities of transformation.
- The visceral experience of detachment is one of relaxation and allowing, in contrast to the anxiety and tight grip of attachment.
- The invitation is to consciously practice detachment this week, letting go and softening into the flow of life’s pure potentiality.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones (00:00):
Thank you. Thank you. What if we woke up singing that every day? Repeating. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Over and over again. That would be a good day. Good morning everyone. My name is Reverend Daryl Jones. My pronouns are he, him, and I am grateful. I thank you all for being here this morning. Not so much for me, but for you. I’m thankful that you are here doing something to nurture and feed your soul, and as you do that, it does nothing but nurture and feed the greater soul of life and the greater soul of the community. The talk title is The Law of Detachment is taken directly out of the book, the Seven Principles and Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra, and I was reflecting, I want to go through them all really quick.
(00:56):
This has been kind of like a long arch if you haven’t been here for the past six, seven weeks. Six weeks. We started off in November with this book and it’s been around for a while. This is something that was a part of my practitioner studies. It was a part of my ministerial studies, but Deepak Chopra has had this book out, I think it was early 94. So there’s some really powerful principles here, and as I was thinking about it, I was like, you know what the book title is The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, but it should be How to be a Better Human. Just How to Deal with All The Ish That’s going on in and Around Your world. So here are the laws that we’ve touched upon so far. The first law is the law of pure potentiality. You may have heard that phrase before, gets used a lot in the quantum physics conversation that there’s this vibrational possibility that everything is a frequency that’s vibrating and it could be anything, right?
(02:08):
It’s not until we look at it and say that’s a wall, that the wall actually becomes a wall. Now, does it disintegrate? It just depends on how tapped into the matrix you are or you aren’t. But the law of pure potentiality to me is the description maybe in a little bit more of a scientific way of what God is, of what the universe is. God is not a thing. God is everything and the potential for anything else to become. So in this first law, the law of pure potentiality, it’s just saying that God is all that there is. And then it goes into the law of giving, which is one of my favorite laws. It’s an important law because we want to receive, right? Am I the only one that wants to receive? Okay, so making sure I’ll have you looking be like, I don’t know.
(02:56):
Do I want to receive? I want to receive. I think that’s why I have such a big body. I want to receive as much. I’m like, I want to experience as much of God as I can possibly. That’s the way I’m chalking it up anyway, but the law of giving is this idea that in the pure potentiality there’s always movement and we want to receive, but if we’re passive, if we’re just waiting to receive, it’s not that the law isn’t working, but it’s kind of sluggish, right? It’s kind of like, oh, I wonder if anyone’s going to call me to do anything this weekend?
(03:39):
Maybe. But if you pick up the phone and you start calling some people, if you give your attention to your relationships, then someone says, oh yeah, you know what? A bunch of us are going down to hear a book reading or whatever. So we need to be in the space of giving ourselves, of getting engaged, and then we look at the law of karma or cause and effect, which is basically asking us to be mindful that we are always planting seeds of possibility. We’re doing it consciously, and a lot of times we’re doing it unconsciously. So we always get into that space of like, well, I didn’t want this to happen. Well, maybe you didn’t want it to happen, but if you’re honest with yourself sometimes and you reflect on your choices and decisions and the thoughts and the thinking and the behaviors that you’ve been engaging in, you can go, oh, I see how this happened.
(04:26):
Right? Nothing’s being done unto you. You’re not being shamed and blamed by something outside of you, but there’s this law of cause and effect. Something happens and something results, and we are in partnership with that. Then it goes into this law of least effort, which is a great one. It seems like it might be a little bit paradoxical to the law of giving right to the law of cause and effect to the law of pure potentiality that we are not supposed to be in the space of constantly pushing. But if you think about the human experience, which we’re going to get more into today, the law of least effort is an invitation to recognize that there’s something about softness, there’s something about spaciousness, and that if we’re always pushing the accelerator of our lives, it can burn out. The engine needs to cool down. And then last week we looked at the law of intention and desire, which is my jam. It’s one of my favorite, favorite things. I think it’s critical and important for us to always have an intention of what and why, and we’re stepping forward. If we’re just walking down the street and we’re like, oh, hmm, I should probably go somewhere today, so I’m just going to start walking.
(05:44):
Where are you going to end up? I don’t know. I just know I just need to go somewhere today. But if I say I need to go to work, I have an intention of getting there and showing up on time. That’s a very different experience than, oh, I should just go for a walk today. I’m oversimplifying it, but you get it. Intention and desire is important. And then that brings us up to the law of detachment. This is to me where the rubber hits the road. Next week, Reverend Amy is going to close things out with a law of dharma and purpose. I cannot wait to hear that at.
(06:17):
So let’s go back to this reading first and foremost, because it speaks to, again, that paradox of doing, of engaging, of intending, of desiring, of attaching on some level, and then the other side of letting go. The law of detachment does not interfere with the law of intention and desire with goal setting, you still have the intention of going in a certain direction. You still have a goal. However, between point A and B, there are infinite possibilities. So we’re exploring in between A and B in the law of detachment, the law of detachment accelerates the whole process of evolution. When you understand this law, you don’t feel compelled to force solutions. When you force solutions on a problem, you only create new problems. But when you put your attention on the uncertainty and you witness the uncertainty, while you expectantly wait for the solution to emerge out of the chaos and the confusion, then what emerges is something very fabulous and exciting. Has anyone ever tried to force a solution?
(07:30):
Yeah, I don’t even think I need to say anything else. Just, yeah, the law of detachment, it can be kind of confusing. Would you agree? Oftentimes it gets misinterpreted as the law of passivity, the law of complacency or the law of do nothingness. And for me, oftentimes that reveals when I’ve tried to force something, right? I’m like, well, that didn’t work. All I do is screw stuff up, so I’m just going to stop. That’s not the law of detachment. That’s frustration. That’s anger. That’s not consciously being tapped into our intention and desire. There’s nothing wrong with that. To me, part of the human experience when embracing the law of detachment, we still act. We do. We still choose, we still behave, but there is an agility of flexibility with the law that the law of detachment promotes within us. So that’s what we’re going to explore, this agility, this flexibility, this dare I say, duality of desire and detachment.
(08:50):
So a quick summary of the law of detachment, and I just want to say for the sake of, oh, hi, everybody online, hi. Hi, hi. For the sake of technology, I am really in the space of playing around with ai. So I asked chat, GPT to give me a five bullet point list of a summary of this law, and this is what it said. First, the law of detachment is to detach from outcomes, detach from outcomes to achieve your desires, release attachment to specific results, focus on the process not controlling the outcome. The second bullet point was that uncertainty is actually key to the law of detachment. We want certainty so bad in our lives, but the key is uncertainty, embracing uncertainty. This is where actually creativity lives. I know there’s some actors in the room if you’ve ever done any improv, it’s not about knowing who you’re going to be when you go into a scene.
(10:08):
It’s stepping into the scene completely ready to be anything that’s called upon you saying yes. And now what uncertainty is key. The third bullet is freedom through detachment, that there is actually a freedom that you can experience as the result of loosening, of letting go. When we are attached, one of the telltale signs, which we’re going to get into the feeling tone of what it means to be in detachment, but the contrast to that is oftentimes when we are very, very attached to things, I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this anxiety, anyone? Yeah. Okay. So if you’re wondering if you are practicing the law of attachment or detachment, check in with your emotions, check in with how you feel. If you’re feeling anxious, chances are you’re pretty attached to something that’s going on or that you are attached to an outcome. And then intent plus detachment. That’s where the game is, right? So he says in this quote that it doesn’t negate the law of intention and desire. It’s actually having intent, having desire, but holding it gently and loosely. That’s where the fun, that’s where God really comes in, and that ultimately the invitation of the law of detachment is to be open to possibilities.
(11:40):
So all of this makes me think of, we’re going to go to the next slide here of thi not Han. This is my boy, this is my homie. We were talking about where would you go if you could time travel? I would time travel back to maybe 10 years ago when he was still living, and I would just go hang out with him in France at his monastery. But he once said, thanks to impermanence, which is the idea that nothing stays permanent, that there’s constant change taking place thanks to impermanence. Everything is possible. Everything is possible. Thank God we are not certain. If we were certain about everything, then a lot of stuff would not be possible. Do you get that? So this law of detachment is inviting us to celebrate the uncertainty, to celebrate the impermanence.
(12:41):
If a piece of corn little kernel was like, this is what I am, and I’m not going to be anything else. Now, not that it’s necessarily cognizant and thinking and choosing what it does, but thanks to impermanence, it evolves into something else. How are you trying to keep yourself as a corn kernel and not letting yourself evolve into a stalk or an ear of corn? Do you get the analogy there? Okay, I didn’t know if that would work. The big thing to remember, and this is where I think we get so tripped up in our spiritual practice and in these spiritual conversations, we have this idea and ideal that we’re going to get to someplace where we’re going to somehow be something other than our human selves.
(13:35):
Would you kind of agree that there’s some part of you that’s like, I cannot wait to be super version of me where I can eat anything I want and my stomach does not get bigger. I cannot wait until there’s a version of me where I can buy anything I want, and the zeros on my bank account are not just zeroes. There’s tens and millions in front of it, and whatever I spend, it just stays replenished. We are going to experience some interesting stuff because we are human, and that’s never going to change. But the challenge is that in our humanity and in our ego, we get hooked these stories that we tell ourselves. So the law of detachment is not so much about the stuff, although it is important to let go of holding onto stuff or people or relationships too tightly, but it’s really, really about checking the stories that are running because that is the thing that is curating, I like to use that word. The stories that we tell are curating the experience of our living. Yes, the confusing part here is attachment versus connection.
(14:51):
I am not asking you and Deepak Chopra is not asking you, and any of the spiritual teachers are not asking you to not be connected. This is where intention and desire comes in. Of course, you need to be connected to everything and you are connected to everything because you are all that is. So be connected to those intention and desires, but don’t get hooked and attached to the outcomes and most importantly, what those outcomes mean. Am I worthy? Are they worthy? Right? Because this isn’t just about the stories of you. You tell a lot of stories about other people.
(15:33):
You’re telling some of them right now, they’re just running. We don’t even have to effort. The stories are just there. So the law of detachment is an invitation into a practice of checking our stories and letting them go. So the law of detachment is a concept. The art of detachment is the experience of our living. You don’t detach once or twice or get it right or even practice it for a year really hard, and then you’re good. The art of detaching is a lifelong practice. Life requires us to engage in this practice every single day, but many days we don’t.
(16:28):
How do I know this? All you have to do is turn on the news. All you have to do is look at your life. We individually and collectively are suffering like crazy. Much of that suffering is due to attachment or hooked into a story of what we think life should be of how those people should be. I’ve talked about this in other Sundays before. I am really drawn to the word art, the art of something. My wife will always say, ju it up a little bit. It just s up anything, right? It emboldens it. So there might be suffering. There’s loving, there’s creating, there’s manifesting, there’s trusting, there’s forgiveness, and all of those things are very powerful. We practice those things. The words and ideas are great, but if we just add the art of suffering, the art of loving, the art, of creating the art, of manifesting the art, of trusting the art of forgiveness, it heightens things. It up a bit. Those words sound lovely, but when we step into the art of something, it emboldens us into the notion that there is a process here. Loving just doesn’t happen. Forgiveness just doesn’t happen. Manifesting just doesn’t happen. There’s a process of it, and that is the art. Everything has an art.
(18:19):
I’m going to go to the next slide here. Oh, I’ve got my papers out of order. There’s an art of putting your papers in order. Could I have the next slide, please? So I had this really cool, this literally just happened yesterday. I was in a coaching session with someone and we were talking about what they’re working on, and we were thinking about this idea of having a prayer mantle that you place things upon an altar. So there’s physical altars, and then there’s these mental altars, and I’m always going into a mental altar. As I walk in and out of situations, I’m placing upon that altar, whatever, challenge, hardship, celebration, and when we place things on the altar, I said that we are in the practice of accepting, releasing and transformation. And all of a sudden I said, oh, snap. Look at that. It’s the art.
(19:28):
The law of detachment tells us what, right? It’s the law. The opening page of this particular chapter reads in detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty. In the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom of our past from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning. And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe. The art of detachment is the process of accepting our past conditioning. We don’t forget about it. We just go, oh, this is my story. This is how I come into life every day. I have this past conditioning of accepting the limits, accepting the limits. Most people don’t want to, but you are limiting yourself. At least I’ll speak for myself. I limit myself every single day, and I need to accept that that’s part of the egoic and human experience in my mind, in my body, in my relationships. We must accept that, and we must accept that. We judge.
(20:46):
We judge things as good and bad all the time, right? Yeah. Yes, we do. This is part of the human experience. So just take into consideration, there have been times in your life that you’ve judged something as good and you’re like, this is good for me. I’m going to go do this. And then all of a sudden you’re like, maybe that wasn’t so good for me. And then there’s been other times when you’re like, there’s no way that is horrible. I can’t do that. And then all of a sudden you’re like, wait a minute, this is actually really good for me.
(21:25):
So we need to check the stories that we are hooking ourselves with the judgments that we make. We need to accept that we’re making them and then release, let them go. When we do that, we make space for what? Transformation. This is the art. We’re constantly in the space of accepting what is, regardless of our opinion of it, practicing, releasing and letting go. And when we do that, transformation happens. This is the art of anything accepting what is releasing our stories, the meaning and opening to transformation. This makes me think of the next slide. You may have heard this dude named Rumi. This gets quoted so many times out beyond the ideas of right doing and wrongdoing. Who wants to go into that field? I attempt to walk through that field every single day, and I want to walk through that field barefoot. I want to ground in it. I want to earth myself in the field that is transcending right doing and wrongdoing.
(22:29):
Again, this is not something that you get to once and then all of a sudden you’re living in this land. This is a daily practice. This is the art of living. So I want to close today with a little bit of an exercise. I want you to take a deep breath in and out, and if it feels good, close your eyes. If it doesn’t, then drop your attention down just so that you’re not distracted by other people moving. The intellectual understanding of detachment, I think everyone gets, but I want to give you a visceral sense of what it feels like to be attached and to be detached, because this is the thing that will give you a gauge as you move through your day.
(23:13):
For me, the feeling, the experience, the palpable, visceral state of detachment is relaxation. Just check in with your body right now. Is it relaxed? Check in with your mind right now. Is it relaxed? Is it trying to process and make sense of all the words that I’ve said, or is it just allowing your attention to be? Take a slow, slow, slow breath in, and as you exhale, soften a little bit more. This is what it feels like to practice the law and the art of detaching. It doesn’t mean that you still don’t have a desire and a goal to go get something yummy for brunch today, but in this moment, you hold that lightly and realize that you are where you are. You accept it, you let go, and then you let this moment be transformative.
(24:24):
And I want to encourage you today because here’s the truth, you’re going to attach over and over and over again. This is the work of the ego and our humanity. We like shiny stuff, so we hold on to it really tight, and it doesn’t make us wrong. It doesn’t make our ego wrong. It doesn’t make our humanity wrong. This is simply part of our experience. When you feel yourself getting tight physically, I mentioned it earlier. When you feel yourself getting anxious, those are telltale signs that you are practicing the law of attachment, the art of holding on for dear life to make something come to pass.
(25:16):
We are here to practice the art of detaching. We accept that we are attached again, and then we release, we attach and we release, and it’s in that actual process that we start to experience some transformation. Take a deep breath in, hold it, and then exhale. Get to emptiness and push, push, push, push, push down, hold yourself at empty and then breathe in hold. Exhale, hold the breath out, and then return to your breathing. Point A and B, in our life is kind of holding our breath right When we hold the breath in, that is what it feels like to practice the law of attachment. We cannot be in the flow of pure potentiality. We can’t be in between points A and B unless we’re allowing the breath of life to breathe us to flow in and out as it naturally desires and wants to. So we are here to be in the practice of creating space for life to be final reflection. Where in your life are you holding your breath?
(26:57):
Where in your life are you so attached to the outcome, holding it all so tight, attempting to control things that literally you cannot move? The tight grip is so strong. There’s no space for transformation. There’s no shame in the game that you may be holding on someplace that you may be trying to control. That is what we do. But right now, you have an opportunity to make an agreement with yourself and with the law of detachment and pure potentiality to make room and space for God and transformation to come into your life. All it requires is your daily willingness to accept that you’re holding on releasing to the best of your ability and let transformation take place, accept, release, transform. There is one power and presence that I know to be the power and presence of all. It is the pure potentiality of life. We can call it by any name we choose because it is so grand and great. It cannot be held in one descriptive word, God, intelligence, wisdom, creativity, freedom, love, light, laughter, joy, pure potentiality. This is the essence of my life and the essence of your life. We are here to live a life of pure potentiality. May we all practice this week consciously detaching, releasing, surrendering, softening, letting go to allow whatever your heart desires. May we do it with ease. May we do it with grace, and may we practice it over and over again. Peace and blessings to you all. May you practice the art of detachment this week like never before, peace and blessings.
(29:14):
Thank you, Reverend Darrell.