Detachment is another name for submission which Hz. Eckhart (1260–1327), a German Dominican monk, uses extensively. Detachment is a virtue one should not think is of the uncaring, unfeeling or disregarding kind. On the contrary, it is the concerned total ownership of the truth with no relative‑component to one’s position on any matter that can interfere with the definition and formulation of the reality for truth sake. In this process, all is as “is” as though the observer, and the judge’s person is absent, with what J. Krishnamurti considers choiceless awareness[1] to see (acquire) how and what truth is present. This attitude to relieve our preferences from the process we have named fidelity in the book “The Unrelative Truth”[2]. Fidelity enables one not to distort, alter or corrupt the pure reality of “is.”

What is spoken by detachment is total immersion into the reality demanding (perfect) fidelity for the thing in itself—OwnSelf—as the divine Reality always warrants.

Take notice of Hz. Ibn ‘Arabī’s caution:

“For the seeing of a thing, itself by itself, is not the same as its seeing itself in another, as it were in a mirror; for it appears to itself in a form that is invested by the location of the vision by that which would only appear to it given the existence of the location and its [the location’s] self‑disclosure to it.”[3]

In other words, submission is the means to end relativity. Submissive‑mean causes a critical juncture where possible misunderstanding or contradiction is avoided. Submitting is not a negative thing since the powers of attention are fully concentrated on the submitted-to other. If the aim is to receive reality—at the ultimate truth level—what is facing us in our existence, then “choiceless awareness” is mandatory by giving up the power of will to choose to exclude what we deem deserves no attention.

Submissive objectivity is a virtue for any judge in order to not be swayed by extraneous influences pulling and pushing in dissonance for ways out of order. The order of objectivity for justice sake is the act of being open to the reality one encounters that warrants holistic surrender asking us to see it as it really is without seeking to dismember and divide. Such surrender gives freedom to allow justice to reign by side stepping our subjectivity, foregoes bias, partiality, as we apply the discipline of our intellectual powers while observing for purity. Bertrand Russell approached submission in the following way when he wrote:

“The submission which religion inculcates in action is essentially the same in spirit as that which science teaches in thought; and the ethical neutrality by which its victories have been achieved is the outcome of that submission.”[4]

The detachment, by “neutrality,” that is always in play in science, aims to not exclude for the virtue of understanding the unity essence of all things. Justice for happiness in human life is only possible by travelling on the path that ensures the will of divine Ownership for Oneness sake. This is the submission—islam—that guides through the Qur’an.

[1] (Krishnamurti, The First and Last Freedom, 1954), 96

[2]  (Güralp, The Unrelative Truth, 2016), 106

[3] (Al-Arabī, The Bezels of Wisdom, 1980), 50

[4] (Russell, Mysticism and Logic, 1957), 30