Spiritual Attachment Explained: A Nondual Perspective

By Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
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Spiritual attachment is a subtle but pervasive experience that can arise in daily life and along the path of awakening. While we often think of attachment as clinging to material objects or relationships, spiritual attachment also includes the tendency to cling to experiences, ideas, or practices that seem “spiritual.”

It can appear as attachment to meditation, spiritual insights, mystical experiences, or even the sense of being awakened. Understanding spiritual attachment requires exploring both the mental and sensory dimensions of experience, and ultimately seeing how it dissolves in the light of nonduality.

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What Is Attachment in Spirituality?

In Buddhism, attachment is defined as tanha, often translated as craving or clinging. It is the mental tendency to grasp at what is pleasant, avoid what is unpleasant, and seek security in what is impermanent. The Buddha taught that attachment is a primary cause of suffering because it relies on the illusion that phenomena are solid, separate, and lasting.
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From a nondual perspective, however, the question of attachment takes on a deeper nuance. Who is there to attach? What is there to attach to? In nonduality, the idea of a separate self is recognized as an illusion, and the apparent “objects” of experience are understood to lack independent existence. When this insight deepens, it becomes clear that attachment is an empty construct (just like all other mental constructs): it has no real essence, no real self to do the attaching, and no solid target to hold onto.

Attachment as a Mental and Sensory Process

Attachment is not just an abstract mental phenomenon—it is intimately felt in the body and the senses. Often, it begins as a subtle energy, a movement that draws attention simultaneously inward and outward to the object of desire. You may notice a sensation of energy moving into thought, as if the mind is being pulled toward an idea, a belief, or a feeling. This apparent movement is accompanied by a certain intensity—a grasping, a clutching, a tension that seeks to “hold onto” the experience.

Even practices considered spiritually beneficial can trigger this process. For example, a meditation experience or spiritual insight might be felt as blissful or expansive. The mind quickly labels it as “good experience” and a subtle attachment forms: a desire to repeat or prolong the experience. The attachment is partially a conceptual thought, but it also includes a sensory experience. You might feel it in the body as an energetic pull, perhaps accompanied by tightness in the chest, excitement in the nervous system, or a sort of outward focused attention.
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This demonstrates that attachment is not only thought-based but embodied. It arises at the interface of sensation and cognition, the meeting place of raw experience and conceptual interpretation.

The Conceptual Nature of Attachment

As awakening deepens, it becomes apparent that attachment is not real, at least not real in the way it seems—it is a conceptual overlay. At its root, what we call 'attachment' is the labeling of raw, sensate experiences—categorizing them as meaningful in a particular way. The pulling sensation, the urgency, the identification with thought—all of these are phenomena arising as an apparent formation. The mind, seeking coherence, names them “attachment,” but the phenomena themselves are not inherently clinging or grasping. They actually have no meaning.
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From a nondual standpoint, attachment exists only as a story the mind tells. Sensations, emotions, and thoughts do not inherently mean anything; they simply arise and pass. Thus, the experience of attachment is ultimately a mental habit, a loop of conceptual interpretation superimposed on transient, impersonal phenomena.

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Seeing Through Attachment

When the conceptual nature of everything is deeply realized, the very notion of attachment (and everything) loses its meaning. Just as we learn that the self is a fluid, contingent process rather than a solid entity, attachment is seen as an empty label imposed on raw experience. In the radical nondual view, nothing is separate, nothing real, and nothing has any meaning. Everything is completely free to be whatever it appears to be in the moment.
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Even the attachment to the ideas of nonduality or awakening itself is eventually recognized as empty. It is just another story in the mind. Paradoxically, seeing that attachment is ultimately unreal often leads to its disappearance. Even though it isn't really real, it seems to end. Quite the paradox indeed!

Practical Implications for the Spiritual Path

Recognizing the non-reality of attachment is not an intellectual exercise but an insight that become obvious at some point. It allows experiences—pleasant, unpleasant, mundane, or spiritual—to arise and pass without clinging. If so-called attachment does happen, it is seen to simple be sensations, not actually a real attachment. Bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions can be observed as they are, without being dragged into a story of “I am attaching" or "I am clinging". Ultimately, these are just stories.

Mindfulness practices and meditation may help you begin to see this for yourself. By noticing the bodily sense of outwardness, pull, or grasping, one can trace attachment back to its source: raw phenomena that are labeled and interpreted by the conceptual mind. Over time, this recognition softens the grip of attachment and can help you move beyond conceptual reality.

Final Thoughts on Attachment (in Spirituality)

Spiritual attachment is a natural part of human experience, even on the path of awakening. From a nondual perspective, attachment is revealed as an empty conceptual overlay on the raw, sensate flow of experience. There is no self to attach, no object to hold, and ultimately no attaching beyond thought. The recognition that attachment itself is empty mirrors the greater insight of nonduality: that all phenomena, including the self, are empty of intrinsic meaning.
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In this sense, awakening is not about eliminating attachment as a moral duty but seeing through it--witnessing its subtle movements in thought, sensation, and energy, and realizing its insubstantial nature. This understanding leads to freedom not by force or effort but through direct recognition: the simple, undeniable truth that nothing can truly be grasped, because nothing is ever separate, solid, known, or fixed.

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