Note: This post is based on a recent talk that can be found on YouTube: https://youtu.be/EEaN3KcT3Jw

In a previous article, I introduced the four fundamental categories of Abhidhamma philosophy: matter, mind, consciousness, and Nibbāna. These may be understood as a vocabulary of insight: four headings under which we can investigate experience and existence.

The Paṭṭhāna, in turn, may be understood as a grammar of insight. It describes the many kinds of conditional relations through which these realities arise and affect one another.

In this article I want to explore one such relation through the ordinary word attraction. I use this word as a personal, philosophical rendering of the Pāli term sampayutta paccaya (traditionally translated as “conascence condition”). I explained in detail in my booklet Companion to Paramattha my reasons for giving alternative translations and explanations for traditional Abhidhamma terminology, so I won’t go into that again here.

My intention here is more modest and more concrete: I want to show that attraction is a genuinely universal principle, one that can be traced through each of the four great categories of existence — matter, mind, consciousness, and Nibbāna — from the coarsest level up to its final transcendence.

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Attraction in Matter

The most immediate image the word “attraction” evokes is probably that of a magnet drawing metal, or drawing another magnet. This has become, in modern times, something of a symbol for the very idea of attraction — and it’s a fitting place to begin.

Consider how strange this phenomenon actually is: a solid object being able to move another object without touching it. We are so used to explanations — electromagnetic fields, diagrams, physics textbooks — that we’ve lost the sense of wonder a child, or a person in antiquity, would have felt on encountering it. Picture a figurine on a table, secretly rigged with a magnet, and another magnet moved underneath by unseen hands: the figurine dances. That image should make more visual some of the strangeness.

The Greeks, encountering this stone in nature, speculated it must have a soul, since it could move things without contact — a magical quality. The Chinese, more gently, called it the “affinity stone.” Eventually, people noticed something stranger still: shaped into an elongated form and balanced on a smooth surface, the stone always turned to point in the same direction — you could turn it, and it would turn back. Hence it eventually came to be known as the “way-finding stone.” Only later did people discover that you don’t actually need to carry the stone itself around with you — you can use it to magnetize a plain piece of metal, and that magnetized metal is what we now call a compass, oriented, as science eventually explained, toward the magnetic poles of the earth.

This is the first, coarsest expression of attraction: within the sphere of matter.

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Attraction in the Senses

A second, more immediate image of attraction is the pull one person feels toward another. This is no less mysterious than magnetism. You may feel entirely composed, balanced, in control of your life — you know where you’re going, you know what to do and what not to do, you know what you want — and then, in an instant, you see a beautiful woman or man, and a spark flies over and electrifies you. Suddenly you’re willing to risk making a fool of yourself. You’re willing to risk your reputation, perhaps even your life, simply to be a little nearer to that person.

Biology offers some explanation: human beings are a two-sex species, built by nature to seek out and supplement one another for the sake of reproduction. But this doesn’t settle the matter completely, because not every man is attracted to every woman, nor every woman to every man. There are further patterns to be discovered, and they run through all six senses:

• Sight — symmetry, proportion, and smoothness make a face, a body, a building, or even a smartphone more attractive. If a person’s body is symmetrical, that generally makes them more beautiful than if one leg is longer than the other, or one eye smaller. The same is true of proportion — a big head on a small body is less attractive than a well-proportioned one — and of smoothness, which we read, correctly, as a sign of health. Human beings, being inventive creatures who like to improve on nature, apply these very patterns whenever they build something they want to look attractive: a temple or church, with its symmetry, its proportion, its marble floors and tiled walls. Our modern devices follow the same logic — smooth, almost mirror-like, symmetrical, so attractive that we want to pick them up even before switching them on. And once switched on, of course, they open onto something stronger still: the most beautiful sights and places on earth, even a kind of heavenly beauty, things that in ancient times only a genius or a prophet might have imagined, now available to anyone at the press of a button.
• Sound — harmoniousness is the auditory counterpart of visual symmetry. A harmonious voice draws us in more than a shrill, squeaky one. Human beings, again improving on nature, learned to sequence sound more harmoniously than anything found in the wild, and by doing so invented music — probably the single most universally attractive human invention. You will probably find not many people who are entirely unmoved by all music, of every kind.
• Smell — the sweet smell of flowers, or simply of fresh air, is more attractive than the smell of decay or stale, stagnant air. Perfume, incense, and the modern room freshener are just our attempts to engineer this pattern further.
• Taste — sweetness, and to some extent saltiness, attracts more than bitterness or sourness. The long list of chemical additives on a food package is, in this sense, only a continuation of what salt and spice have done for thousands of years: making food more attractive so that we buy more of it and eat more of it.
• Touch — a gentle stroke, a hug, a massage, draws us in; a blow, a stab, a burn repels us.

And why does any of this matter? Because if you don’t want to be perpetually pushed and pulled by whatever sight, sound, or taste happens to pass in front of you, understanding this mechanism can help you. Once you see the pattern as a pattern, rather than as fate, it slows the pull down just enough that you begin to think while it’s happening — and that alone gives you back a measure of control.

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Attraction in the Mind

Attraction doesn’t only live in matter and the senses — it exists just as much in the mind. As we grow more familiar with other people, and with ourselves, we stop noticing only the outer surface and slowly start noticing the mind itself, and its qualities. We become attracted to the mind.

At first this is almost entirely undiscriminating. We can be drawn to any thought, any emotion, any fantasy, quite independently of whether it’s beautiful or not. This is why a depressed mind will circle back again and again to tormenting memories and images — not because they’re pleasant, but because they feel more intimate, more deep, than the surface. And this is also why someone can remain attracted to a partner who treats them badly. Everyone else in their life, they may know only as a kind of sense-sphere phenomenon — appearance, voice, mannerism. But with that one difficult partner, they’ve had actual contact with a mind, however troubled it is. That contact itself becomes the attraction, quite apart from whether the person deserves it.

Gradually, though, as a person matures and gains life experience, they come into contact with more beautiful qualities — in themselves or in others — and the attraction refines itself. We become drawn to what the Abhidhamma calls “beautiful mental factors”: benevolence, faith, compassion, lack of greed, lack of hate, lack of delusion, willpower — what in modern language we’d simply call virtues, and what later Buddhist literature gathered under the heading of the ten pāramīs: benevolence, generousness, wisdom, truthfulness, and so on. These are the attractive qualities of mind. And as we’re drawn toward them, we become correspondingly repelled by their opposites.

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Attraction in Consciousness

I define consciousness, as I’ve explained elsewhere, as an individual way of perceiving the world. For illustration: a person raised in a family of businesspeople comes to perceive a world weighted by monetary value, security, career. A person raised among musicians comes to perceive a world weighted by what opens the mind and what imprisons it. Two such people could occupy the very same room and still inhabit almost entirely different worlds. What conditions this difference, most fundamentally, is ideas.

So when we talk about attraction in relation to consciousness, one way of talking about it, is talking about what makes an idea attractive. And here I want to make one thing clear from the outset: the attractiveness of an idea is not the same as its truth. Truth is one factor that can make an idea attractive — but only one among several. Let me list a few others.

• Explanatory power. An idea that seems to explain a great deal at once — a theory of everything — is attractive simply because of its reach. Astrology is a good example. Although I have real respect for astrology, and there’s much of value in it, but its explanatory reach outran its accuracy. It made a certain sense in a geocentric world, where the sun and moon visibly affected the earth and it seemed natural to extend that influence to the other planets. In a heliocentric universe, where the planets simply travel with us around the sun, the mechanism becomes far harder to defend, and studies of astrological prediction have generally not been kind to it. None of this makes astrology valueless — it only shows that explanatory breadth and truth are two different things.
• Simplicity. An idea that reduces a complicated problem to one tidy cause is attractive precisely because it spares us the harder work of engaging with real complexity. The conspiracy theory that all wars are caused and controlled by a small handful of powerful people is a good example — it hands you, in one stroke, a complete explanation, while ignoring the nature of human beings, of cultures, of nations. It’s attractive because it’s simple, not because it’s accurate.
• Novelty. Sheer strangeness can be its own draw. Consider the genuine conspiracy theory, held by a surprising number of people, that the world’s royal families, heads of banks, and top politicians are actually a race of reptilian beings from outer space, running the world for their own hidden ends. What makes such an idea attractive is precisely that it lets you smuggle something normally filed under “fiction” into the realm of fact. That novelty is interesting, but it does nothing really to make the idea true.
• Elegance and beauty. The idea of an all-loving, all-powerful God who created a world that is therefore inherently good and inherently meaningful is a beautiful, consoling idea — and that beauty is exactly why it attracts so many people, quite apart from whether it accords with how the world actually presents itself.
• Flattery, personal or communal. Any idea that grants you superiority without requiring you to do anything for it will tend to feel attractive for that reason alone — whether it’s astrology telling you your star sign makes you especially spiritual, an ideology telling you your race or skin colour makes you superior, or a religion telling you that only your path leads to heaven or enlightenment. All of this can be found in every religion and culture, Buddhism included. Still, the fact that an idea flatters you is no evidence that it is true.
• Authority and charisma. Words spoken by someone widely regarded as wise, holy, or simply successful, inherit some of that person’s attractiveness. And even though it may be reasonable to weigh such a person’s words higher that of ordinary persons — still, hearing something from a wise person is not the same as knowing it yourself, since even wise people can say untrue things, intentionally or not.
• Self-verification. This brings me to a further, and in some ways final, condition: an idea you have investigated and confirmed for yourself — through your own observation and reasoning, while staying genuinely open to other views and new evidence — becomes attractive in a way other people’s ideas rarely are. It has become, in a real sense, your truth, and for that reason it will usually attract you more strongly than an idea merely borrowed from someone else, whether or not it happens to be more accurate.

Since the ideas we find attractive shape the world we perceive, they also, in the end, shape consciousness itself.

I should add one caution here. An attractive idea, even one that flatters or simplifies, can genuinely help you for a while. If you carry some inferiority complex, adopting a conspiracy theory can make you feel, for a time, wonderfully superior — you alone see how the world really works, while everyone else remains blind. But sooner or later this kind of idea runs into its own contradictions, and you fall back into a pit of suffering, often a deeper one than before. Not every attractive idea is capable of carrying you very far.

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Attraction and Nibbāna

Finally, we come to Nibbāna — which, in the frame I use, is not only the unconditioned element but the entire heading under which I group the path of transcendence: to be precise, the transcendence of matter, mind, and consciousness.

The path to Nibbāna is, from this angle, a path of progressively overcoming attraction. We first loosen our attraction to matter and the senses by growing familiar with the mind — our own and others’. In Buddhist teaching this step is often skipped over; you usually hear that the first step is virtue. But before virtue is even possible, there has to be simple contact with the mind, undiscriminating as that contact may initially be. Only through maturing do we learn to distinguish unwholesome qualities from wholesome ones, becoming more drawn to the latter and more repelled by the former.

But even this has to be outgrown. The sage does not swing between attraction to virtuous people and repulsion from vicious ones — the sage remains equanimous toward both, while still perceiving the difference between virtue and its absence perfectly clearly. This is because even virtue is impermanent: a virtuous person can be undone by trauma; a person full of vice can be remade, sometimes overnight, by insight or conversion. Neither mind nor its virtues, however superior to sense-pleasure, can serve as an ultimate refuge.

So we need to go further, and one place to go is ideas — beginning, inevitably, with ideas we simply find attractive, for any of the reasons listed above. That’s fine as a starting point, provided we don’t stop there. So, I should add a caution here. An attractive idea, even one that flatters or simplifies, can genuinely help you for a while. For instance, if you carry some inferiority complex, adopting a conspiracy theory can make you feel, for a time, wonderfully superior — you alone see how the world really works, while everyone else remains blind. But sooner or later this kind of idea runs into its own contradictions, and you fall back into a pit of suffering, often a deeper one than before. Hence, not every attractive idea is capable of carrying you very far.

What separates an idea that merely feels good from one that actually moves you forward is this: does it make you more awake, or does it ask you to close your eyes to whatever doesn’t fit? A genuinely useful idea explains the world you actually experience, without requiring blind spots, and by doing so it gradually deconditions you — first from the senses, then from the mind, and finally from your own narrow personal point of view, until you begin to see the world in something closer to an objective or actually universal manner, unconfined by your private history, fantasies, and feelings. That deconditioning is, in fact, the real meaning behind calling Nibbāna “the Unconditioned Element.”

As this process matures, we cease to be merely individual, isolated beings, and become something closer to what I like to call a “Dhamma creature” — one that magnifies the truth of existence rather than merely inhabiting a private corner of it. And hence, consciousness eventually seeks to transcend attraction to anything phenomenal whatsoever. Since attraction can only ever occur between a subject and an object, the final transcendence of attraction is nothing other than the transcendence of that very distinction — the point at which we are no longer a subject regarding an objective world, but something that is, properly speaking, neither subjective nor objective at all.

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Closing Thought

I hope this has shown something of the universality of attraction as a condition — traceable from the coarsest phenomena of matter, through the senses and the mind, into consciousness, and finally to its own transcendence in Nibbāna. My hope is that seeing this pattern clearly can help you locate more precisely where you stand on this spectrum, and what the next honest step forward might look like.