Psychology of Disengagement

 During the Chan and Enlightenment study group today, a participant had raised an interesting question over the passage which reads, regarding the Theravadin arhats, "[I]n their minds there is not anything they want to do, nor is there anything they do not want to do" (p.182). She wondered if this perhaps entails a kind of indifference, which is perhaps similar to the experience of someone not having any preference as to what to do or not to do. As I was going home, I started to relate this topic to a question of what it means to be disengaged from certain aspects of life. Does disengagement really mean "not being connected" and "not desiring" something, or is it a bit more complicated than that?
   Buddhist notions of disengagement are much more nuanced than that of "keeping one's distance" or suppressing desires, or even trying to escape from unpleasant situations. In fact, the Buddhist notion relates precisely to the quote from Sheng Yen's book: it's not that I want to "do nothing", as I am open to doing anything. It means that the mind is not moving to preferring one state of being to the other. I am reminded here of what I once read in Schopenhauer's writings, when he talks about how we often nostalgically look back to our past because we are looking at it through the lens of things as they really are, without imposing a particular will to be or to have things, on the past memory. When my experience is not influenced by will or desire, what I experience is perfectly perfect: it is endowed with an endless and beautiful presence which arises spontaneously, without having to will its meaning into existence.
   I have had such moments of "beholding things as they are without desire" before when looking at neighborhoods in Toronto. I have often been filled with the fleeing sense of presence when I am looking at a neighborhood without a sense of prior experience of the place, let alone personalities I might associate with it. When I used to go on walks in my undergraduate university years, I would often deliberately try to seek this experience of disorientation and newness in my various walks and haunts, but I often had to deliberately suspend what I thought I knew about the place. That takes a certain amount of openness, which often happens when I am trying to "sum up" what I have experienced in a single emotion rather than trying to get lost in the details of everyday life and anxiety. Even underneath the dull and dreadful sense of 'disconnection' which we sometimes experience in life, there is a very palpable and living engagement which is inseparable from one's sense of being in the universe. It is a "there-ness" that can't fully be described much less contained.
   Disengagement, I think, is really the will getting in the way of this experience of being which is always there in the background of day to day living. It is a kind of inner conflict which arises in the disparity between what one wants to happen and what is happening in the moment.When the will gets in the way, it's all about trying to achieve the goal of some distant or vague happiness. But when I don't let the will ensnare me and practice with the faith that things are already deeply meaningful in each moment, then Idon't feel "cut off" from the distant goal itself, and I start to see things as they are without having to assert the self or even feel anything in particular. Kierkegaard at one time remarked that he had experienced such a sense of engagement in something as simple as staring at somebody's nose! I think we can all enjoy moments where just being in the present yields unexpected joys, which are not forced or planned in any way.

Sheng Yen (2014). Chan and Enlightenment. Taipei: Dharma Drum Publishing