Emotional Attachment and the Concept of Moksha

In class on Tuesday, we discussed the various stages of goal-setting that a person might go through according to the Hindu belief system.  The stages were pleasure, worldly success, service for the benefit of others, and then eventual release from the cycle of life and death along with the dissipation of the self as a separate being.  While I do like the ideas of this worldview, there seems to have been at least one important feature of life on Earth which it neglected to mention - that of emotional attachment.

The first category of pleasure includes certain kinds of interpersonal relations, such as sexual relations.  However, relations which are purely emotional (friendship or non-sexual love, for example - the two may or may not be the same thing) seem unlikely to fall under the same category.  Worldly success obviously does not apply to these relationships, as being in them does not usually get one any sort of material benefit, and even if it does it is still not the central reason for having the relationship.  Service to others similarly does not work; friendship is a two-way street (or a more-than-two-way street), so to speak, so being in a relationship of that sort is simultaneously beneficial to both or all people involved.

If one does succeed in escaping the cycle of reincarnation, one will become a fully integrated part of the universe.  However, one will lose everything that made one unique and a separate, self-coherent entity.  This includes personality.  If one had a group of very close friends, whom one loved very much, even if all the friends left the cycle at once at at the same time as one did one would still be 'losing' those friends, so to speak; their personalities, as well as one's own personality, would vanish.  If one liked these friends for their personalities (which is, I would say, the best reason for liking them), one would effectively be losing these friends as soon as one or all of them left the reincarnation cycle.

It occurred to me that the reason the originators of this sort of thinking may have neglected to think of emotional bonds such as the ones mentioned above is that they may not have observed or experienced such bonds.  For most people, friendships are relatively casual relationships; the only sort of really close relationship they experience is romantic.  While a good number of romantic relationships do include incredibly close emotional bonds, on the surface they may appear to be based primarily on sex; so, if the people who came up with the system had not personally been in any romantic relationships (or any peculiarly close friendships/other non-sexual love-based relationships), they might not have realized the intensity of certain types of emotional attachment.