Everything loved for its own sake, outside God alone, blinds the intellect and destroys judgement of moral values. It vitiates choices so that good from evil can not be distinguished and God's will can not be truly known. A person can have given up the pleasures and ambitions of the world but if he has acquired pleasures and ambitions of a spiritual nature, he is not detached. Spiritual detachment means giving up prayer, fasting, meditation, devotions, virtues and any other practice, idea or attitude that is valued for itself. Interior peace and a sense of the presence of God are as created as an automobile or a glass of beer and, as such, are imperfections preventing union with God. It is only when any attachment to all knowledge, all created wisdom, all pleasure, all prudence, all human joy, all striving, even after the love of God, and all human hope is defeated will a person be free. Because this detachment is a gift of God, it can not be bought by any act of will; it can not be acquired by spiritual exercises. At the same time a person can prepare himself to receive this gift by seriously undertaking to totally renounce all attachments. To rest in the beauty of God is natural, can be desired by nature and can be acquired by natural disciplines and can be a source of attachment; it also must be given up.
For Meister Eckhart, detachment is the immovability of the spirit despite joy or sorrow, honour or disgrace, because these are transient things, they are not God. This is how man is like God. Detachment leads man to purity, from purity to simplicity and from simplicity to understanding. By grace, man is drawn away from the temporal and purified from the transient. It is by the practice of detachment that one reaches the soul's ground and attains similarity and therefore union with God. Detachment does not imply indifference to the sufferings and failings of the world. They are real and so is one's duty to relieve them. But in attending to the needs of the world and alert to the demands of the moment one must not be self-seeking. There is obedience to God's will and indifference to one's own personal feelings.
