The Illusion of Possession

I have been pondering about this idea of possession or property for a really long time. Buddhism, Hinduism talk about non-attachment, enlightenment, but those concepts sometimes seem so beyond my understanding that it becomes hard to actually implement them in real life.

Nevertheless, while I was talking to my girlfriend, the understanding of the term possession just came to me. The idea is really simple. The truth is that we really don’t own anything or anybody in our lives. Property, possessions are just terms made up by society in order to improve communication, trade, but to me personally, they do not have much meaning.

Let us look at our lives first. We come to this life alone and leave this life alone. The only thing that we really “posses” or own are ourselves, our minds, our souls, our bodies. Throughout life some people accumulate things such as houses, cards, yachts, paintings and so on, but they don’t really own them. Once you go away, none of those things really have any value to you, they do not make you a better person, they do not enhance who you are as a human being. Have you ever heard of a proverb saying: “Don’t be happy when you find something, don’t cry when you loose it”? I am sure we all have, but do we really understand how much power it holds? For example, you find a wallet with $100. Now you plan to put it use and get something out of it, but then before you are actually able to use that money, you lose it. Question? Has your life gotten any better because or worse after finding and losing the money? I would so no; it hasn’t because if you would have never found the money it would have never affected you in any way. Some people get upset about it, yet…

Lets zoom out and look at our life from the beginning to the end. You are born. You have nothing and nobody; you are just a soul within this world. Yet, as you go through life you stumble upon people, you get into relationships, and then you start buying things. However, you never had those things or never needed those people. Almost by choice you got into those relationships. Funny thing is that once you lose things that you never had, and lose relationships, which never existed before and when you on your own could be just as happy, you become sad, unhappy, depressed and unfulfilled. But you just lost something you never had? So why are you sad? Ask yourself that and then think about it and see if it really makes sense to feel negative emotions. Personally, it doesn’t to me. Don’t get me wrong, if my girlfriend left me right now, I would be extremely upset, yet I have to understand that she never belonged to me. If I would not have met her, I would not have to be upset if she left me. It is hard, but it is the truth. And the truth about the idea of mine, I own, I posses is not real in the first place, it is made up in our heads and it is the cause of unhappiness, pain, depression.

When you lose something or somebody, you really don’t lose anything because in reality nothing really belonged to you in the first place. Some people might oppose this view and say that it is selfish, cold and oversimplified and that it doesn’t take into account love and hard work that you had to put in to acquire anything. I disagree. Why? Because true love is not possessive. I think the world love very much overused term and in today’s world it became to mean the highest level of possession. That is not love that is greed and selfishness. Love is not possessive, it is forgiving, giving and being able to let go. Dalai Lame perfectly expressed himself: “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” That is, do not forget the experience; don’t forget what you learned during the time when you were with somebody, when you had that job, when you had that car. I believe it all comes don’t to appreciation. If you don’t appreciate, then you don’t “need” it.

Appreciation does not require possession. You can appreciate other people, paintings, music with actually owning it. Once again, you can’t really own anything in your life; it is just temporarily with you.
Some might ask: “Well, what the hell are you then suggesting? If we don’t own anything, then why even bother living? If we die alone, just like we are born, then why even bother living?” The answer is fairly simple. The only things that do stay with you are memories, knowledge, and experience. Nobody can take those away with you, you can relive happy moments in your life over and over again, some chose to replay sad ones, but it is quite a different subject.

I guess, the whole point of this entry is to help some people understand that possession is imaginary. You are you with your own reality. You do not control other events or other people. Build yourself, build your knowledge, experience and character because what you “own” today might be gone tomorrow and there is no need to be upset about it because all that happened was that you got a chance, an opportunity to live along with certain people, in a certain environment. No matter if it is by choice or by accident, you were doing fine before you “had” certain things, so there is no need be upset when you don’t have something you never had. Learn and grow and be aware. Think about it.