Detachment

Detachment, in the language of the Rhineland mystics, is the soul’s freedom from attachment to creatures, to its own will and even to its images of God. Meister Eckhart called it abegescheidenheit, “being cut off” or “withdrawn”, and in a treatise on the subject ranked it above love: love compels me to love God, he argued, but detachment compels God to come to me. A related word, gelâzenheit, “letting-be” or “releasement”, names the state of one who has let go of all and lets God be God within.

For Eckhart and his followers detachment is not indifference to the world. It is the condition of the birth of God in the soul, and of a life of action freed from self-seeking: one may work in the world while remaining inwardly empty and free. Tauler made it the centre of his practical teaching, and the word Gelassenheit passed through Protestant mysticism to Heidegger, who used it for a thinking that lets things be.

Comparable ideas are found in many traditions: the dispassion (vairāgya) that the Yoga Sūtras pair with practice, the Buddhist freedom from craving and clinging, and the Stoic freedom from the passions. They differ in whether what is gained is union with God, the isolation of consciousness, or the end of suffering.