#474 – Who could you become if you weren't attached?

Once your values override your critical thinking, you're done evolving: your ideas, beliefs, and mental habits have become more stubborn than your presence.

When my friend Isabel Del Olmo was working on her PhD, I was one of her many subjects.

To understand how the sense of morality evolves in people, she gave us a questionnaire with 10 difficult moral dilemmas. For example, "you're a doctor and your community doesn't allow euthanasia. One of your patients is terminally ill, no chance of recovery. They ask you to help them die. What do you do?"

She then measured our intelligence, religiosity (adherence to organized religion), and personality, looking for any correlation between these and our moral-development stage.

The results were astounding: the only aspect she found to influence moral development was religiosity––and it was a negative correlation. That is, the more religious the individual, the less advanced their moral development.

Her explanation was that radical attachment to rules makes you rigid, but true morality requires flexibility, because the highest degree of moral development is one in which you're ready to rethink your "principles," blowing them up and rebuilding them if necessary, when the dilemma can't fit their boundaries.

Talking to a friend yesterday, I thought about my past attachment to wearing black. I've had other attachments too: not going to clubs, not eating animals, quitting tap-dancing when my teacher moved back to Barcelona.

Did those attachments play a role in my evolution as a human? Did I need to forgo them in order to continue to grow?

Yes, stunting it. And yes, and I did.

Now, I realize that non-attachment is the basis of evolution. You can have your values, you need them. But if they're so rigid that they prevent you to bend, your certainty will replace your curiosity. And that’s how wisdom becomes dogma.

What would be possible for you if you weren't attached?

Love,

Carolina