Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablet on Detachment from the World

The Master, in many Tablets gathered in *Selections from the Writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá,* returns to the teaching on detachment. The teaching is among the most central of the Bahá'í practical disciplines, and the Master is careful to distinguish it from several adjacent ideas with which it might be confused.

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> Detachment is the cleansing of the heart from every > attachment save the love of God.

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The opening sentence of the Tablet sets the definition. Detachment is not, in the Master's understanding, the abandonment of the world. The Bahá'í is not asked to retreat to the cloister or the desert. The Bahá'í is in fact specifically asked to remain in the world, to engage in honest work, to marry and to raise families, and to participate fully in the civic and economic life of the community.

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What the Bahá'í is asked to be detached from is not the world's activities but the world's bondage. The activities themselves — work, family, civic engagement, the enjoyment of the good things of creation — are blessings to be received with thanks.

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The bondage is the tendency of the soul to be enslaved by them: to need a particular outcome to be happy; to be unable to release a particular attachment when the time for its release has come; to identify the self with the object of attachment to the point that the loss of the object would destroy the self.

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The Tablet provides several practical signs by which the believer may judge the state of the heart. Is the believer content if the praise of others is withheld? Is the believer content if the income or the position should be diminished? Is the believer content if the loved one is removed by the natural workings of life and death?

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In every case the Master's standard is the same: the soul that has genuinely cleansed itself from the bondage of attachment will be at peace, even in the painful loss, because its deepest love and its deepest security are placed in the One beyond loss.

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The Tablet closes with the image that has been frequently quoted from it: the empty cup ready to be filled. The soul that has emptied itself of every lower attachment becomes, by that emptying, the cup into which the Beloved may pour the new wine. The soul that has not emptied itself remains full of its own contents and has no room for the gift the Beloved is waiting to give.

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The discipline is the work of a lifetime. Few souls complete it. The Master, in the closing benediction of the Tablet, encourages the friends to take it up patiently and to be content with the small daily increases that are the ordinary measure of progress.

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