All attachment is a hindrance to sadhana. Goodwill you should have for all, psychic kindness for all, but no vital attachment.
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When one deals with people there can be always a projection of consciousness to them or a reception of them into the consciousness, but that does not amount to an attachment — something more is needed, a grip of the vital on the person or a grip of the person on one’s vital etc.
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A relation also can be established on a sure basis only when it is free from attachment or when it is predominantly psychic on both sides.
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Certainly, there should be no attachment [to another person]. The emotional feeling is safe only when it is governed by the Psychic — for the psychic love is essentially a permanent soul sympathy which is not attached but self-existent and self-content pouring itself out but asking for nothing. The safest course in sadhana is to turn all to the Divine and to leave any other relation till all relations can be founded in the Divine; but that is not easy for everybody — only a few seem able to do it.1
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Sannyasa does not take away attachment — it amounts only to running away from the object of attachment which may help but cannot by itself alone be the radical cure.2
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The seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction.3
~ Sri Aurobindo
To be free from all attachment does not mean running away from all occasion for attachment. All these people who assert their asceticism, not only run away but warn others not to try!
This seems so obvious to me. When you need to run away from a thing in order not to experience it, it means that you are not above it, you are still on the same level.
Anything that suppresses, diminishes or lessens cannot bring freedom. Freedom has to be experienced in the whole of life and in all sensations.4
It is not a matter of giving up all these things, since they make up, at least to a great extent, the aim and purpose of your existence. But you must give up all attachment to these things, so that you may feel capable of living without them, or rather so that you may be ready, if they leave you, to rebuild a new life for yourself, in new circumstances, and to do this indefinitely, for such is the consequence of immortality. This state may be defined in this way: to be able to organise and carry out everything with utmost care and attention and yet remain free from all desire and attachment, for if you wish to escape death, you must not be bound by anything that will perish.5
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No attachments, no desires, no impulses, no preferences; perfect equanimity, unchanging peace and absolute faith in the Divine protection: with that you are safe, without it you are in peril. And as long as you are not safe, it is better to do like little chickens that take shelter under the mother’s wings.6
~The Mother
References:
- CWSA Vol. 31, Letters on Yoga-4, P: 316-17
- CWSA Vol. 29, Letters on Yoga-2, P: 384
- CWSA Vol. 23-24, The Synthesis of Yoga, P: 348
- CWM Vol. 10, P: 194
- CWM Vol. 12, P: 85-86
- CWM Vol. 03, P: 48