Imagine a school annual day celebration where a play is being performed on stage. There are many characters involved in the performance — a king, a queen, ministers, sages, and several other participants. Most of the important action and dialogue happen at the center of the stage.
Among the participants is a young boy acting as a soldier. His role is very small. He simply stands at the side of the stage holding a sword.
Now imagine the boy's mother sitting among the audience with her phone, recording the performance.
Where would her camera be focused?
Would she record the entire play?
Most likely not.
Her camera would remain fixed on her son. Even if he were standing quietly in the corner of the stage without speaking a word, she would continue recording him. The central storyline, the interactions among the other characters, and the larger performance would almost disappear from her attention.
The entire play is the reality of what is happening on stage. But for the mother, the child becomes the center of that reality.
This is not because the play changed. It is because attachment changed perception. Attachment makes us focus intensely on one small part while losing sight of the larger picture.
Two things begin happening simultaneously:
We start seeing what is not there.
We stop seeing what is there.
The child who merely stands in the corner slowly becomes the hero of the play in the mother's eyes.
Meanwhile, the actual story unfolding on stage is no longer receiving attention.
This is how attachment creates distortion. This attachment is called raga in our scriptures.
Raga is not simply liking something. It is strong attachment, a strong preference, an emotional pull toward something. When we become strongly attached to something, we naturally develop the opposite force as well — dvesha, or aversion.
Where there are strong likes, there will also be strong dislikes.
We begin protecting whatever we are attached to and resisting anything that threatens it. The stronger the attachment, the stronger the aversion becomes. When this process strengthens, it eventually leads to moha — delusion.
Delusion does not necessarily mean imagining unreal things. It means losing the ability to see truth as it is. Raga and dvesha begin to distort reality itself.
We stop seeing situations objectively and start seeing them through the lens of our preferences and emotional pulls.
Just as colored glasses alter every scene viewed through them, attachment and aversion begin coloring our understanding of the world.
The intellect is the faculty that helps us discriminate, discern, and make right judgments. But when attachment becomes strong, the intellect slowly loses its independence. Our intellect becomes clouded. The pull of likes and dislikes becomes so powerful that the intellect can no longer function clearly. It is almost as if the intellect becomes infected by a virus. And when the intellect becomes clouded, we stop seeing reality as it truly is.
Instead of seeing situations for what they are, we start evaluating everything based on our emotional preferences.
We no longer ask:
"What is true?"
Instead, we begin asking:
"What supports what I am attached to?"
This becomes dangerous because our decisions, judgments, and actions all emerge from that distorted understanding.
The truth itself has not changed.
Reality has not changed.
Only our lens has changed.
The example of the mother at the school play may appear simple, but it reveals something profound. Attachment narrows our field of vision. It pulls our attention toward one small corner and convinces us that this corner is the whole picture.