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Attachment and Liberation

The Buddhist/Taoist concept of attachment, with Jacob's framing — vegetarianism as test, not goal.

The core insight

"While it's a nice thing to do, the big thing is, if you're attached to eating meat, that's yet another attachment that you haven't let go of."

Vegetarianism in many contemplative traditions isn't really about animal welfare. It's about detecting whether the practitioner is capable of sustained release of an attachment. Meat-eating is a sufficiently embedded daily pleasure that releasing it for an extended period is a useful diagnostic.

The diagnostic, not the destination

"It's a sign that you can't [release] if you can't do it for an extensive period of time, really let go of that attachment and not snap back."

Two readings:

  • Failed test → revealing attachment that's worth working on
  • Passed test → the attachment isn't pulling, you're free to choose either way

The point is the freedom to choose, not the choice itself.

The reverse trap

"Now, at some level, if you get too attached to being vegetarian, then you're also too attached, and you can't do that either."

The standard secondary trap: identification with the new identity creates a fresh attachment. The truly free practitioner can eat meat or not, vegetarian-identify or not, with no charge either way.

"That's also attachment and obscuration, and the Tao isn't able to speak clearly through you, because it's there."

Self-grasping as the deeper layer

The deeper diagnostic isn't about food specifically; it's about clinging to one's own life:

"There's a sort of self-grasping inside, where it's like, 'Oh, I'm so desperate to my own life. I can't be well unless I am eating meat and killing animals.' And then you're rationalizing — 'You know, I'm justifying killing all these things.' And what else can you justify with that logic, and so on and so forth."

The attachment to meat is a stand-in for the deeper attachment to survival of this particular self-pattern. Working on the surface attachment is a way to surface the underlying one.

"If you're clinging on to this body and this life too hard, it's also a problem. So therefore, like, it may not even align with health to a certain extent, but does align with full liberation of your soul."

The river of integrated self

"The energy practice of the Qigong that's so powerful is it really starts to feel like there's this river of spirit going through, and it's wanting something. And you can just kind of follow what it's wanting, which is, you could call it your more integrated self."

Liberation from attachment isn't loss — it's the unblocking of access to the integrated-self river. The previous attachment was acting as a dam.

"Let's just say for now, it's the river of your deeper self, the quiet voice of what it would feel like to have all your subconscious energies integrated."

The recursion

David then asked: "How good can it feel to have all that power reintegrated?" Jacob: "That's what you get — moving with no internal resistance, no internal conflict, lining up all the energies, all the confused energies inside you."

So the attachment-release work is structurally identical to the Inner Ecosystem integration work — looking at it from a different angle.

Stage-relativity

"The view evolves, and even the sense of what is right and wrong at each stage can change."

What counts as an attachment to release depends on the stage. Releasing "violence" is the obvious early-stage work. Releasing "non-violence-as-identity" is mid-stage. Releasing "having-a-self-at-all" is late-stage. Each release reveals the next attachment.

This is the whole reason Jacob takes Stages of Adult Development seriously — different stages need different things, and what looks like wisdom at one level looks like attachment at the next.

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