If I got a dollar for every time someone came up to me and said that they do not listen to the Dhamma for fear of having to let go of the many things in life which they have become so accustomed to having and associating with for pleasure, I would be a rich man by now! 
Fortunately, I am a monk now and in the extremely fortunate position of not having to handle any money at all. So that would partly explain why, despite the abundance of naysayers, I do not have a dime to my name. As a matter of fact, technically speaking, today I am one of the poorest people alive. My personal assets are my two sets of robes and an alms bowl. This is my lot on earth and anything else I use, I do with permission from someone else, either explicit or implied. But things were not always so. Far from it.

A walk down memory lane

I know what it is like to live the so-called good life – a loving family and friends, an adoring wife, a good education culminating in a first-class honours degree from a prestigious British university, a highly successful career in investment banking in London City with excellent prospects, wealth, property, nice cars and fame. Movies, music, fine dining, travel, luxury holidays, and partying with friends were part of my lavish lifestyle. Settling down in the UK, my lay wife and I earned ourselves the freedom to travel the world as we pleased. Weekends were the anticipated highlight of the week as we would get together with friends and go sightseeing, camping, adventure sports and on indulgent retreats. Money was hardly an obstacle as I always had the means to get what I wanted, and I learnt how to bring in much more. However, I was never a fool to define my success by mere affluence, as from a young age, I had the remarkable fortune to have a life coach and read the right books from which I learned the habits of highly effective people, how to think and grow rich, how to get things done, the makings of a rich dad and a poor dad, as well as how to win friends and influence people. These encounters were such a blessing to my life as I picked up priceless gems of worldly wisdom that shaped my life even better and instilled within me an attitude of unbreakable resilience and a formidable character. Two skills I picked up along the way, leadership and communication, propelled my professional career by leaps and bounds. In my spare time, I studied the markets and started making investments for an early retirement I had planned to take at forty. A break into the world of cryptocurrency came to me around this time, and through a well-planned investment management strategy (and more than a small amount of luck), I was able to turn around a small fortune. Looking after my physical health as part of a healthy lifestyle was no less important. Martial arts, competitive sports, swimming and working out at the gym were part of my weekly routine. I enjoyed a life many youths would be willing to give their eye teeth for. I was incredibly grateful for all that I had… until one chance encounter completely recharted the course of my life. Fate would have it that my accumulated merits over perhaps many lifetimes would present me the opportunity to listen to a Dhamma talk, which was unlike any other I had heard before. The rest is history.

Our readers may recall a short narration of Prince Siddartha’s life from last week’s article, and although it may seem like I am drawing parallels here, clearly, the brief autobiographical account above is no match for the opulence and extravagant lifestyle he enjoyed in his palaces or the profundity of his renunciation and the circumstances surrounding it. He was the son of a mighty king who was unrelentingly determined and spared no expense to prevent the prophecy that his son would go on to become a Buddha, from being fulfilled. Therefore, to even suggest that the two may have much in common would be farcical, and so that is not what I wish to do here. Rather than attempt to point out any similarities between the two tales, my intention is to highlight a striking contrast between the two – the Prince let go, but I did not!

This might sound baffling to our readers as, on the face of it, it seems both let go of their worldly lives and went into robes. Although the end result seems the same, the paths getting there were very, very different. But before we untangle this enigma, let us revisit the sticky problem of the three-year-old from last week, as it will give us some pointers in the right direction. 

The adults who bought the toy car took a liking to it at first sight, but the child did not. On the other hand, the child found the bit of sticky tape rather amusing, which left the adults in shock and dismay. Why did the adults and the child respond differently to the two objects?
Value creation and attribution

The answer lies in the fundamental principle of value creation and attribution. The mind naturally leans itself to any object that it believes is of value. The object could be anything: a corporeal object such as an apple, a toy, or a piece of sticky tape; a person such as a mother, a father, one’s spouse, or a friend; an event such as a sunset, waves crashing on the beach, or the countdown to the new year on the Big Ben; an outcome such as a profit, a promotion, or winning a game of hockey; or even something conceptual such as love, freedom, respect, dignity… or even, the perception of oneself! The mind constantly looks to associate with entities that it attributes positive value to and to dissociate itself from things it attributes negative value to. Well, that seems fairly obvious, but what is its significance to our discussion? 
The issue lies in our tendency to assign this value to the object itself, treating it like an intrinsic quality such as its mass, shape, or size. Let me clarify a crucial point here. Value in this context does not refer to the object’s economic value (its price in the marketplace), functional value (based on what it can do), antique value (based on its historical significance) or symbolic value (based on what it represents), although they may very well contribute to the overall value that the mind attributes to it. As the mind investigates an object, it gleans all the information that is available to it and makes a unique and personal determination of its value. This value is created wholly in the mind, and as a sentimental value of sorts, it is always subjective, never objective. It can be influenced by various value systems but is not deterministic upon them. This self-determined value is then ascribed to the object, and during the course of its mental perception, the ascribed value is erroneously considered an intrinsic property of the object when it is, of course, merely a mental fabrication. In essence, the mind sees what it believes. The result of this is that just as the mind perceives an object to be of a particular mass, shape, size or colour, it also perceives it to be of high or low value; to reiterate, the value that the mind cooked up and attributed to it, not an objective intrinsic value.

“How much harm can a little mental concoction really do? It seems pretty harmless, and if no one is hurt, is it so bad…?” one might argue until one realises the flawed value system based on which this value is determined. There is a constant expectation in the mind to be satisfied, fulfilled, and made happy, and this value is determined by the mind’s perceived potential for an object to help achieve this objective. Out of ignorance, if the mind believes that an object has the potential to satisfy it, it attaches to the object and thus, craving is born. This is the basic premise of all suffering, and we will discuss this topic in more detail in future articles. For now, let us consider how this mental behaviour affected the events. 

The adults in our story attributed a high positive value to the toy car based on their understanding of the object, while the child’s positive value attribution was to the piece of sticky tape. In relation to the child’s behaviour, it might have been the first time the child had encountered a piece of sticky tape and may have found the novel tactile experience of adhesion most amusing. As he experienced much pleasure from it, the child would have attributed value to either the tape, the stickiness or both, and this would be why he immediately developed a bond with it. As to why the car did not interest him much at the beginning, we can speculate that the child had other toys which were similar to the toy car, and although the sight of the toy would have pleased him and therefore earned some value, in that moment, he found the sticky tape much more amusing as it was a whole new experience altogether, which piqued his interest and curiosity. Newness is generally a nascent concept to a three-year-old, and in this case, it was not only the toy that was new. The toy had to compete with his other, also new, discovery – stickiness. So, in that aspect, they were on a level playing field. Here, we can observe an interesting behaviour of the mind, which is that when two or more objects of perceived value are presented, the mind shows an affinity for the object to which it has attributed greater value. Our readers will remember that a little later, he lost interest in the tape entirely. What could that have been triggered by? As he continued to play with it, one of two things could have happened. Either the novelty of the stickiness wore off, or the glue on the tape dried out, and the tape was no longer sticky. Either way, the tape could no longer satisfy him, and therefore, the mental value attributed to it soon diminished. Alongside his natural weaning off it, his mother also made what seemed at the time like rather unsuccessful attempts to talk him out of playing with the tape and instead play with the toy. However, assuming the child understood what the mother was saying, we cannot entirely discount the effect of her words on him. The salient point here is that when one no longer believes that an object is a source of pleasure, satisfaction or fulfilment, there is no longer an expectation on it to deliver them. Thus, the mental value that was once attributed to it diminishes altogether, and along with it, attachment and craving for it. Therefore, where there is no value creation there is no value attribution. Where there is no value attribution, there is no attachment. One can only let go of something that they are attached to. But when there is no attachment, what is there to let go of?

Would our readers care to guess which action of the mother you feel was most and least conducive to the child eventually losing interest in the tape? The single most productive step would have been the mother pretending to play with the toy, as that would have fed the child more information about how much fun it would bring him if he did the same. And of all the things she did, snatching the sticky tape from the child was the most unproductive, as typically, that only heightened his desire to acquire the object. There are reasons why this is so, as future articles will reveal. 

Let us now turn our attention to the adults. I believe it is now obvious to our readers why the adults attributed little or no value to the sticky tape. The adults attributed value to the toy car. As our readers will soon realise, there are myriad factors which contribute to the mental value-creation process. The information which contributed to creating this value would have included not only attributes directly associated with the toy, such as the price tag, the smart packaging, tasteful colours, the premium look and feel of the manufacturing and its finish, but also indirect factors, such as branding, advertising and commercials, the in-store customer experience and even the location of the product in relation to the layout of the store. Little do people realise that advertisers pay for access to our minds in order to give us information which influences our personal value creation, which in turn influences our consumer behaviour. It might be scary to contemplate, but advertising reaches all the way through our cognitive systems to affect how we see the world. The more you study the pervasive reach advertising has in our lives, the more you begin to wonder how much of the choices we make are truly independent. However, with little to no understanding of the mind and why it falls victim to such contrivances, the average Joe has no hope whatsoever to fight the urges triggered by advertising, let alone make independent choices. This is one of the reasons why we must empower as many people as possible across the world with the wisdom they deserve to unshackle themselves from their delusional thinking patterns and regain control of their lives. The sad truth is that despite our claims to advanced cognitive ability and freedom of thought, most people's lives are merely an involuntary play out of someone else's agenda.

One further question remains from the previous article. Why did the adults, particularly the mother, feel embarrassed when the child seemed uninterested in the gift? I would like our readers to have a go at answering this question using what you have learned so far. Hint: think about value creation and value attribution. Feel free to drop your answer via email, and we will include the best correct response in next week’s issue.

Finally, I must justify my statement above that the Prince let go, but I did not. When the young Prince renounced his lay life, he had no teacher or the Dhamma to help him understand what I have explained above. Therefore, although he had an unparalleled determination and an unbelievable amount of willpower to leave his loved ones behind in search of the truth, he was still very much attached to them, and so he had to let go.

I, on the other hand, had the miraculous fortune of receiving the Buddha’s teaching from my Guru Hamuduruwo even as a layman and having realised that happiness could not be found in material possessions, had lost interest in them, just as the young child did once he realised the piece of tape could no longer satisfy him. So when it was my turn to renounce my lay life, there was not much at all that I was mentally holding on to that was left for me to let go. The purpose of Buddhism, then is not to let go, but to realise that the things we hold on to have no intrinsic value. Once that is realised, like the autumn leaves falling off the trees do not hurt the trees they once belonged to, one can rise freely up and above the worldly possessions which held them down and captive throughout their lives.