Dinesh Kamath's Editorial (Detachment doesn't slove problems - it makes matter worse) that was published in Newsband

Detachment doesn’t solve problems – it makes matter worse

Religious preachers say that one should give up desire. They say that desire gives birth to all the sins. The occurrence of wars and disputes are mainly due to birth of desire, they say. Next they say that if you give up all desires you’ll reach God and attain godhood. Now isn’t this wanting to attain godhood a kind of desire? So when you talk about giving up your desires, if you create a desire to give up your desire, you are still in desire. So it is very clear that one just can’t give up desire. You have to live with desire throughout your life. Greed can never vanish. Man will remain ever greedy. But man should have some kind of control over his greed. If he can’t control his greed then the result can be disastrous.

In fact, there are modern gurus who say that you should desire all or in other words you should desire everything. They advise people to desire the highest in life and that too with all their passions. According to them, the energy that you call life and the energy that you call desire are not different. No desire means really no possibility for life. So what to do with your desires? Just desire the highest in life. With all your passion, desire for the highest.

The teachings of detachment and desirelessness have come because of the fear of entanglement. A large segment of the population is entangled in something or the other, and entanglement always creates pain and suffering within a person. Somebody gave this foolish solution ‘be detached.’ So their solution for life is, ‘avoid it.’ If you want to live, you need involvement.

What is joy and sorrow? In other words, what is heaven and hell? If you are in anything willingly, that is your heaven. If you are in anything unwillingly, that is your hell. What is most beautiful can become the ugliest thing if it happens to you unwillingly. So the moment you want to feel detached you become unwilling for the process of life; you make a hell out of yourself. Those who have made a hell out of themselves will invariably make a hell out of the world also. If somebody is joyful, he will make sure that everything around him is like that.

Thus detachment is not the solution to any problem. The more you try to get detached, the more you will suffer. The best way to enjoy life is to face life and accept life the way it is.