A simple model to describe Distress vs Sensitivity

 

SO given some crisis we can adjust our sensitivity to reduce the apparent magnitude of distress we feel.

It is like hearing. If our hearing is sensitive then things will appear loud, while if we put ear defenders on to reduce our sensitivity then sounds will appear quiet.

When we are sensitive as in A above then a crisis will appear very significant and cause great distress as it overwhelms our senses (red). If we grow less sensitive B then that same crisis will seem quiet and we will feel on top of the "distress" and comfortable (green).

However while we may feel better, it is at the cost of our "sensitivity."

Sensitivity is like clarity of soul. When we are sensitive and vulnerable we see things clearly and we feel things deeply. Like being deaf will protect us from loud unwelcome sounds, but it does so at the cost of having no sounds at all.

Obviously within a crisis it is tempting (or even necessary at some level) to get rid of our experience of the crisis so we reduce our sensitivity.

With reduced sensitivity we feel less and we see less, but this is like turning down the lights or putting up a fog or dust screen. We cannot see clearly and we start to make bad decisions.

The longer we keep our Sensitivity Threshold "up" (in the diagram) as in raise the size of experience we need to register something, which is to actually to reduce our sensitivity then the longer we are operating in a semi-darkness and the more likely we are to walk off the path and get lost.

So this applies to all kinds of crisis and trauma. In a war we may start to experience huge stress so we raise of Sensitivity Threshold to reduce the level of things. But in so doing we become hardened our self and are more likely to take extreme action our self. This amplified across a whole population will lead to ever increasing violence and the chance of peace gets ever further away.

If we think of people after a war back in safe ordinary circumstances then their Sensitivity Thresholds start to reduce. However they will start to look at their war experiences with increasing sensitive eyes and so start a new stage of delayed crisis as they re-experience everything in a more vivid way. This secondary pain, after the crisis has gone, may be unwelcome and so people get stuck in an insensitive state of mind where they behave in a more violent and insensitive way. This will occur with any kind of abuse. To overcome the raised Threshold and lowered sensitivity will require a secondary stage of pain as sensitivity is restored. This kind of pain is intangible since their appears to be no cause. Its not like the rockets are still falling, the war is over and yet we feel worse now than during the war. We may even seek war out again to justify our insensitivity and avoid the pain of becoming sensitive.

SO the key solution here is to be aware of a secondary kind of pain that does not come from outside, but instead is associated with becoming more sensitive so that we see things more vividly.

Sensitivity as hinted above is another word for being truly alive and open to experience, to live fully with reality. But to get here involved processing a lot of pain that turns up as we become more aware of crisis and trauma. This pain is a massive block to facing reality and our true selves and I speculate this is the biggest block to spirituality. Walking the path to truth involves becoming sensitive and open and this will unlock a tsunami of pain that we have been essentually avoiding.

I wonder in mythology where this is symbolised. Certainly the hero must face demons, monsters and battles against which they will invariably almost! lack the faith to overcome. This is all fear. I wonder if the depression and negativity of facing the reality of traumas is fully codified in mythology. Perhaps Oedipus comes closest as the realisation of the magnitude of past actions comes to haunt him. But this is slightly different as it is dressed up in Tragedy and the necessary impossibility of the victim to escape their destiny. The negativity here is simply apparent as we become more sensitive and feel the same things as before just deeper.

Ultimately however once we break through then feelings and sensations become just feelings and sensations and we lose the grip on them which we normally feel will sink "us." If you hold a falling stone you will drown. Let go for it and it will fall quite naturally to where it belong without any drama. We can watch a falling boulder drop to the bottom of the crystal clear lake with a purely serene and sensitive mind. Things in this world do not actually carry any real crisis. The problem occurs when we are not sensitive enough yet to see that this is true. In the confusion of insensitivity we hold onto the boulder thinking it is important to us and get dragged into the depths. In the pain and panic we are even less capable of seeing that we just need to let go. That boulder of course is our "self" but it takes great sensitivity to see the truth of this and let go, and that involves experiencing a lot of pain first.

Grasping Man vs Homo capiens

 So in taxonomy humans have the name Homo sapiens which means Wise Man.

But actually when you look at humans their life is not actually about wisdom it is about grasping at things they want and trying to hold on to them.

So really taxonomy should list modern Humans as Homo capiens .

At some point in the future there may evolve Homo sapiens which will be very different from H. capiens . Sapiens will value freedom and truth and be unconcerned about what they can own and grasp.

== a second text in this ==

By incredible irony it turns out that 'capiens' is latin for taking or grasping. So I'm proposing that modern humans should not be called Homo sapiens, but Homo capiens. H. capiens behaviour is typified by taking hold of things and trying to keep them, often at great personal cost. The general behaviour is termed Capitalism. The species Homo sapiens, by contrast, behaves differently: it is wise and does not exhibit this grasping behaviour, preferring unburdened giving and freedom.

Energy and Emptiness

You cannot make something out of nothing.

This is a basic law in both Physics and Buddhism.

The key (particularly in Buddhism) is the some-thing. You cannot make a thing out of nothing, you must make a thing out of another thing.

This is the essence of the Law of Causation and Dependent Arising. Things no not arise without first the conditions and cause all being present.

Anyone who has tried to make a camp fire knows they need to get the conditions just right and then you apply the spark, or work if using a friction method to generate the initial heat. Fires do not just happen in space by themselves.

Now not all things are things. I like the every day example of baking a cake. No one would say a cake was anything like flour, butter, sugar, egg or oven heat. But put them all together just right with a bit of extra work and you have cake. You can sell the cake for more than the ingredients not just because you have added some extra energy, but because a "cake" is not like its ingredients and it has a completely different taste and look. A baker has apparently made something completely new out of nothing. One moment there is no cake in the kitchen, come back in an hour and there is magically a cake.

But we know there is some kind of illusion here because no cake was smuggled in secretly, and we also note that the raw ingredient mix has disappeared and in its place is a cake. So we say that the ingredients have "cooked" and turned into a cake. So we know that there is nothing new here, its still just the ingredients but they have changed.

Now how is change possible if you have the same ingredients before and after? Nothing new is made by the universe and yet things are always changing. What is change?

They call this emergent property in modern physics and maths. From simple processes you can get quite unexpected behaviours. These apparently new things were not baked into the system, they have emerged. Conway's game of life was one of the first to popularise this idea that simple rules applied to a field can create startlingly original results. It turns out that this simple game is Turing complete which means you can do anything with it. 

So if the building blocks are simple where does the complexity exist? I have written a lot about this in blog so won't repeat but it does not exist! In Buddhism and Hinduism they say it is in the "mind."

Now we might protest. When a lion takes down a gazelle this is not the work of an individual leg or jaw, this is the combined work of a complete entity working together. A whole lion must exist, and it must be different from its parts. Unless you have a whole functioning lion then the gazelle could just walk away. Say the heart fails then suddenly no threat at all! Now try and tell the gazelle that the lion is just an emergent property of atoms and basic processes.

And we can dive straight in to Buddhism there because of course the gazelle is just an emergent property! To which it protests I am a gazelle don't try and break me down into atoms and basic processes (I am thinking of of the inimitable James Hendry on WildEarth or AfriCams saying that). But this is the essence of the illusion of Self. You may try and put a solid entity into the emergent properties surrounding the area you think is yourself, but don't be mistaken there is nothing there beyond the ingredients! So when the gazelle gets eaten by the lion or indeed runs away and escapes no question this is all happening, but it's a mistake the imply from it that there is an ingredient call a Lion and another called a Gazelle. I mean if a Lion was made of a Lion then it would not be made would it, and all things are made: Genesis is right about that. A lion must be made from things that are not lion and so a Lion itself is not a fundamental entity of the universe. And neither are we!

So where does Energy and Emptiness come into this?

Well if all things are made, and are really no more than their ingredients then you can't make something out of nothing. You can only make something out of exactly the right ingredients and so there is never any gain.

I sometimes think its a bit depressing that something as extraordinary as a lion is really no more than the soil and sunlight that grows the grass that feeds the kudu that feeds the lion, along with an admittedly extraordinary process of evolution to fashion the DNA and other things that make a lion's egg and sperm: the seeds for a lion. But I think any depression we feel over this thought comes from the way the Sciences have separated the Material from the Living. Isn't it ridiculous that there is nothing in the Living world other than Matter and yet we divide the world into Living things and inanimate physical matter,. They are the same, it is just a play of words to separate them. So nothing less amazing about the soils in which plants grow than the plants themselves. All part of the system. And of course another angle on that is that Depression itself is just made, it is just an emergent property of ingredients that are not themselves Depression.

This idea that there is never any gain, and in fact all things are the same is Emptiness. The name "emptiness" stems from the idea that if the ingredients of a cake are no different from a cake then the cake itself has no substance or contents and so is empty. We say that the reflection of something on water is empty because it is an illusion. But if we can be tricked into thinking a reflection is something then are we not tricked by the thing itself into thinking it is something? After all a reflection is only possible because we normally use light to identify things and so when we reflect that light to take a different path to our eyes we get the illusion of the thing being somewhere it is not. If we really saw things then reflections would be impossible!

Quick attention to the possible sophistry there. So context is everything. A reflection is a reflection and seeing the source of the reflection is not a reflection. Looking at the Moon is not a reflection, but seeing it reflected in water is a reflection. These are the normal meanings of the words in usual context, and not everything is a reflection. However it gives us a useful tool for analysing the experience of vision. A reflection looks like the source object, yet it has no substance to it. You put your hand into the water to pick up the moon and it disappears in ripples. You have been tricked into thinking something was there when it wasn't. Now obviously you send a rocket to the moon and you can walk on the real Moon. This is not a reflection like the one in the water. This is the normal context of these discussions. But look again. Once we have been tricked we realise that the image is not by itself proof that something is there. This means that the "look" of something is empty! The image is empty and we need do some more investigating to decide if it is backed by a real thing. Now on deeper investigation we come to see all phenomena through all the senses as empty. They are just pictures or feelings of the world and we need do more work to find out what the world is really like. This is the process of Science taking data (seeing the Moon) and turning it into solid facts like landing on the Moon. But now the question of which is the authority. Do you believe what you see or what you are taught or know? And we see we are not clear of trouble yet. Abandon seeing the Moon and turn to Science and we then have to trust people and we are still in an uncertain shadowy world. Funny that even after landing on the Moon many people think this is an illusion created by NASA. So it turns out you can't ever get Solid Facts. Everything is uncertain to some degree. So we return back to the senses. When you are seeing the Moon, whether it is reflection or not, we have an image of the Moon. This image, reflection, phenomenon, vision whatever it is, that is Real. It is there and it is manifest before us. But it is empty. We don't feel too happy with empty things to begin with because we are grasping beings and we like to profit and to possess (maybe just because we live under the doctrine of Capitalism?). But with practice we realise that empty or not makes no difference to phenomena: they are there whatever we think about them.

But the Emtpiness of phenomena is their power. Being empty they can change. And this gives us the richness of experience which is always changing and alive. Because a Cake is not different from its ingredients the actual "Cakeness" that we like is empty and has no substance to it. And this means that it can change. The grasping person may struggle with this because the like cake and they want it to exist in some permanent way and last forever. And then it is eaten and gone and they no longer have any cake and they must let go of it. But without the emptiness of that phenomenon we would be stuck with the solid matter of if and we would have to take that sensation of cake and take it down the tip at some stage to dispose of it. But we are lucky. As soon as the conditions change the sensation of cake is completely gone with nothing left and we are experiencing something else.

This fact that nothing is ever really created, that the substance of the universe is the same yesterday as it is today (the cake is no different from its ingredients) and the change is just empty phenomena means that at root the universe does not change, and the change we experience is just an empty reflection occurring on this static universe. We have the best of both worlds in this reality, all the vibrancy of a changing world but set upon a stable and permanent stage.

Now where is all this in Physics. Well Noether observed that symmetry in the universe turns up as Conservation Laws.

https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Classical_Mechanics/Supplemental_Modules_(Classical_Mechanics)/Conservation_of_Mass_and_Energy/Noether's_Theorem_for_Energy#:~:text=Specifically%2C%20Noether's%20theorem%20says%20that,ll%20call%20this%20time%20symmetry.

And all the above is an exposition of a conservation Law that nothing is every made or destroyed. This is the same as the Conservation of Energy. The sum of energy before and after is always the same. This is the same observation that the Cakeness of a cake cannot be any different from the ingredients. The origin of this in Physics is the observation that the Laws of physics do not change. When Newton devised his laws in the C18th he did it in a Universe that works the exact same way today. In this sense Physics is saying the same that the Universe does not change. So if the Laws are constant, and the Energy is constant then how do things happen?

Well its the same issue as Emptiness. There is no energy in the happening itself. Happening does not itself exist. If a Planet orbiting a Star manifested as a new Planet at each instant then very quickly the whole orbit would be filled and it would crash into itself. The Planet must manifest and then transform into the New Planet perfectly with no left over so in fact nothing really changes. We may go well its moved I can see that, but we are ignoring the gravitational acceleration to keep it in orbit and a weird thing that movement itself is relative. You can't see a thing move by itself. You must look at it in relation to something else.

When Newton says in his 2nd Law that a body continues in a constant state of motion until affected by a force he is saying that our state of motion does not change. He does not stay we "keep moving." To be "moving" we need measure that state of motion against something else. If we measure against something going one way we will be going the other and vice versa. There is no actual "movement" only a state of motion that does not change, although what it is depends how we measure it! So we don't actually ever have a fixed motion, and we we see things moving they are not inherent to the thing but a feature of the difference between things. In a universe with just 1 thing it would have no motion! It could experience acceleration and speeding up and down and we could keep track of that in our mobile phone accelerometers, but since we could not measure our starting motion we could never infer absolutely what our motion was, only the change. It is weird to think that motion is only ever relative. Seeing the planet move around the Sun we think that motion is somehow fixed and solid, but its only relative to the Sun and how that is moving we don't know. This is why the Galaxy Song in Monty Python's Meaning of Life feels so unintuitive. True we are travelling incredibly fast relative to galactic centre etc but we are not really "moving" as motion is not real, only ever relative. You can chose how fast you are going just by picking your point of reference. It is acceleration that is real. So going "well it moved I can see that" is not so absolute as we think. It is actually an empty, relative phenomenon like the reflection of the moon.

===

Actually acceleration is dv/dt. So it is still relative just relative in time. We look at the motion at t0 and then at t1 and measure the change is relative motion and we have the average acceleration. The only thing in all this that is supposedly fixed is time and space in that you can fix a moment in time and a point in space. But you can't all you can do is decide that a particular measurement is your starting measurement. Quite what they is in "reality" you have no idea.

How does Enlightenment help?

I overheard a girl on holiday saying that she had done her morning gym routine, yoga and meditation and should be feeling much better than she was.

That is the essence of unenlightenment.

Pema Chonron says that enlightenment does not change the messy inner world we experience. Nor does it change the outer either.

The first step of spirituality is often to seek tangible, literal peace. So we go and sit by a lotus lake.

But the ocean of Samsara is always churning and there is no peace in its choppy waters. The world does not stop for us when we enlighten.

The move is simply to stop trying to stand on the ocean of Samsara. We don't need to put out weight on its waters and we therefore don't need to thrown about by its waves. The waves are there, but we are not trying to put ourselves into them.

Like the girl at the top, we usually look to put ourselves into the picture. After all these activities I should be standing on nice feelings. Why do we even standing on bad feeling? Samara is full of bad feelings, why stand on them and why get away from them to stand somewhere else?

It's this belief we must standing in the world that is the mistake. And the cause is that we think we are a something that needs to stand there. The ocean can churn all by itself without us being in it, or indeed anywhere, or indeed anyone! Instead of trying to help ourselves out of or across the water, the magical step is realising there is no one, in fact, to help.

Ego and Time

That experience of savouring something because we will not get it again, like the last day of a brilliant holiday or the end of a special meal, or perhaps the last day of a decade in our life or a year is often flavoured by thought of the future and no longer having this special moment. But this is actually wrong.

When can we savour something?

There is only one answer regardless when we do it and that answer is now.

The thought that we will not be able to do it in the future is impossible because you can only savour now.

The reason why we think to the future comes from this idea of a fixed being passing through time that will travel into the future and no longer have this experience. But this is wrong. Future self is not the same as present self. Indeed future self cannot savour this experience because it will be savouring something else.

That idea that they are connected ultimately comes from memory. Future self will have access to memories of what is happening now. But that doesn't make it the same as this self now. The person looking out of those eyes now is not the same as the one looking out of future eyes. And while it has access to memory, this is like giving someone a book and when they read it thinking they will be you.

So there is no one to savour this for but ourselves now, and thoughts of the future are not really relevant.

Those experiences we have looking into the Past and thinking I wish I was there again are no different from watching a movie and wanting to be the person in the film, or day dreaming about being our role model. Wishing to be some where else, or someone else is just basic displeasure with our current situation which is fair enough. But we'd do better to deal with the problem in the present than day dream about times gone or other people's lives, and perhaps before even that just face the feelings of discomfort and displeasure themselves since they are what are upsetting us away from the Present. So back in the Present the past and the future don't matter do much and we just spend some time getting used to whatever feelings and aspects of present experience we are running from.

Then when we savour the present we don't need to hold onto it or store it for later, because later we will be savouring that.

The Cross and Letting Go

 This is an incredibly common symbol in the West, but what does it really mean?

As a kid encountering Christianity I asked the same question and no one knew. Odd heh? How can the centre piece of a religion not be understood by anyone?

Well the symbolism within Jewish mythology refers to the idea of the "scape goat" where the sins of the community were placed on a lamb which was then killed to take punishment for these sins and in so doing free the community from the wrath of God that they deserve for those sins. So Jesus likens himself to the "scape goat" dying for our sins.

And lets be clear what behaviour drives God mad? It is breaking the Laws of Moses, and especially promises to God.

So the core belief of Christianity is based upon a deeper belief that someone can die for your own sins, and idea that goes way back into the history of the Middle East.

But how can someone else die for your sins? Does anyone really believe that? It seems like a fraud. I'll sin all the same, and then put those sins of someone else and kill them and God is happy with that?

Something wrong with this.

Okay we get into the depths of how to approach religious belief. Is it literal or are the ways of God explained to us in ritual and symbolism?

So what else does Jesus say? He definitely never offers killing as a way of God. He never killed anyone and when his disciple pulls out a dagger in Gethsemane he says "put it away, those who live by the sword die by the sword." And when he went to cross he did it willingly. Early Christians took this as an indication that rather than fight they should die like Jesus and the idea of the Martyr was born - literally immediately after Jesus died.

So the immediate understanding of what Jesus taught was that the way of God was not to kill anything but become a sacrifice and martyr our self.

Now there is some ambiguity here. A Christian may say well if Jesus died for my sins then I am free from the punishment for sin and can do what I like.

But Jesus made the bargain very exact: you must believe in me and follow me in order to have your sin absolved. And this is where the martyr comes from. To see Jesus in Heaven we need follow Jesus into Heaven. While he died for our sins, to prove we are worthy of absolution we must give our whole lives to Jesus.

Any bit of us which does not want to follow Jesus, and wishes to have its own independent existence is actually in the hands of the Devil.

Now I faced exactly this dilemma when I got confirmed. I was very young, and yet I fully understood what this meant. To follow Jesus means to give up oneself. And even as a child that is not appealing. I want to be myself and live my life we think. I do not want to give it all to Jesus. So I'll give some of it and see how it goes.

And that worked. I obviously gave enough to Jesus that I made spiritual progress and gained what in the East is called a Jhana. But Akusala from Kusala gaining spiritual progress sets you aside from other people and this actually inflates the bits of self you hid from Jesus and kept for yourself. So within 1 year I had risen and then fallen into an egotistical mess with no time for Jesus. I turned to Science and then Philosophy because like a Renaissance scholar I now believed I didn't need anyone and could do it all by myself. In this you can see very quickly what is being played out in slow motion in the West of a civilisation starting out obedient to Jesus to thinking it knows it all and doesn't need Jesus and then the free fall into meaningless self-certainty and oblivion.

Unfortunately Christianity does not really warn you of any of this and the Devil can wade in to anyone who hides bits of themselves from Jesus.

So we begin to see what the Cross is really about. It's about letting go of our self so that we can be of service to other people and God.

Now how hard is this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

All the time we think I need this for myself. I had an experience yesterday where I was in competition with someone to deliver a mathematical result. Now it should have been easy for me with a maths minor at University and they not even having finished basic education. But he beat me to it simply by manipulating an existing expression heuristically and still no one understand why it works. But that rooted out my ego! Apparently my ego hides in mathematical expertise. I feel I need to succeed mathematically for some reason. It give me joy to get results, I hang with people who enjoy this skill and I expect to get regarded professionally and socially as someone with mathematical skill and yet here I had to take second place to someone who has no mathematical background at all. That hurt.

Yet what is the main characteristic of emptiness? Emptiness presents itself as conditional. It hurts for me to not excel mathematically but for many people it means nothing. I hold on to this skill, I think its important to me. Other people do not experience that.

Now the thing for the Ego to realise is that it is not necessary. It may argue, but my career depends on it, my reputation depends on it. I will lose my job, I will have to change my career. People won't respect me. I will lose my status.

But all this is relative. All this may happen. It is all quite possible. Some people do experience this, some people have to experience this. For someone to go up, someone must come down. This is the relative conditional world. Our status and experience of life is relative to other things. When they go up, we go down (in a relative experience).

But we want to go beyond the relative. What is the key to all this relative world? It is based on "me."

At the top we established that to follow Jesus is to give our whole self to Jesus. This "me" that is suffering in the relative world, thinking some people failed but this person is not going to fail, I will not allow it, this is not happening to me. This is the "me" that doesn't want to turn to Jesus. This is the "me" that the Devil has on a leash and can control and make you suffer with. Our foot in Hell is this "me." This me is the bit we hold onto instead of Jesus, and we hold on so tight that even Jesus and God cannot get us to let go. The God Fearing are highly regarded, because standing in the presence of God we are too afraid to  dare try and hide a part of our self from God. Like Adam and Eve hiding their nakedness, the God fearing realise they cannot hide any part of them self. There is no part of them self that they can store away for them self. Nothing is really "my life" every last bit is illuminated by God and belongs to God. But we have to let go, our own grasp on it. And that is incredibly hard indeed.

At the heart of it are these beliefs that "I" need this thing that I hold on to. In my case above it is mathematical prowess. Now if I really had a mathematically skill why would I hold on to it? A bird does not hold onto flying or a fish does not hold on to swimming it is just what they do. They probably don't even notice. These are God given skills and what we have we have, and what we don't have we don't have. Now this does not mean we lie on our back and let God live our life for us. That is the going too far the other way, throwing our life away. What it means is that when we discover we did not deliver mathematically then we look at the situation. Is there anything I can do? Did I not take it seriously, and perhaps can try harder? Is the something I can learn? Perhaps new training and skills. Or perhaps quite possibly I find I am not as good as I thought. It is possible. Perhaps a change of career, its all possible. I know people who started technical and found they were better at management so reskilled with BMA. All things are possible. But the problem is because we are holding to one possibility and that grasping is the problem, And that grasping is because Ego has hidden its nakedness in that bush and it hurts for God to find us and reveal us and show that we has been hiding and proving our self from inside this bush.

Every time we try and steal a bit of our self away to live its own life we end up suffering. And I did this at Confirmation and 40 years later I still experience the suffering of that mistake.

So returning to the top: what is this symbol of a Cross?

Well there are things of some importance (but not very very important) like our career. We can lose jobs and careers and there is still so much food and opportunity around we can always get a job, money and food. We can lose friends and gain friends. There are so many possibilities, some requiring change and some not. This is the essence of freedom and emptiness. But we grasp so tight to some things that change seems impossible.

And surely the biggest of them all is death. Well not quite true, some people hold so tight to things that even death seems preferable and they kill themselves. I remember David Icke speaking of the almost total humiliation he felt when the nation ridiculed him for turquoise Terry Wogan interview. Well regardless what we think of his beliefs he is human and had human responses. He said later that being completely ridiculed and rejected by the public was one of his greatest fears. His ego resided in having public acceptance (not unreasonably we may say) but ego is still ego. He actually thanks this experience for having got rid of his fear of ridicule which freed him up for the path that life took him. So he is stronger in fact for letting go of something that I think holds a lot of people back.

But death surely that is the limit. We need Life and so self-preservation is all important. The Ego can hide in defending itself and its freedom and living its life?

Well what is the cross telling us? No this is not true you can even lose your life!

If we think about it we all die anyway. Death is not unthinkable, it happens, and we all must face it one day. In fact the whole fear of death is not really of death but in having to let go of the main hiding place of the Ego.

Now this is not a lesson is martyrdom and self-sacrifice. The natural response to grasping is pushing away. We think, okay if I should not hold onto my life then I will throw it away like a soldier.

No

The point is just to be free with what we hold and let go of. Middle Path in Buddhism. When the world is telling you to let go, just let go and pick up something else. Don't just struggle pointlessly. Letting go does not mean things need to fly away from us. We can still stand next to them, we just aren't wasting time holding them tight. If I'm good at maths, if God gave me this skill, then why and what am I holding on to?

So you get this in singing contests. It takes a lot of work to be good. But if you ARE good then it comes naturally. If every day is a mountain to climb then you are compensating for not being good. That is one choice. But aren't there other choices? Why are you holding on to singing if its so hard and unnatural? If God did not make you a singer then why are you trying to sing? If it's because your Ego thinks you need to sing then perhaps its time to out your ego and show your nakedness to God to see what he really has in store for you. I know a professional cyclist and much of his success was based on a belief he had to win. Obviously he was also good, but he went that step further than other people cos it meant more. In later life he has reviewed this and realised that winning was not as important as he originally thought. The belief we need something, the holding on to it, is because he are hiding from God in it.

Now with some things there is an uphill struggle involved. IF we have a drug addiction then every day coming off drugs is going to be uphill. If we have a huge emotional grievance then every day will be hard for a long time. But we know what is the right way and keep going, even if its with head down and just a small step each day. No one said life was easy, at least not while we still haven't learnt to let go and pick up as things change. When someone we love dies it is unbearable not being able to hold them physically and mentally. But this just reveals how much we have grasped them, and how unaccustomed we are to letting go of them. This is made 1000x harder if our ego was hiding in them. If for example we are proud of having them as partner then when they go, our ego is thrown into the open before God and it hurts. God will punish us every time we try and hide in the world.

So this is the real meaning of those cross symbols. And I must be care full because there is ego in even saying this. What if I am wrong, I want to be right, is my ego hiding in even these words? Faith in God is not about being right, accepting you are wrong is closer to God in fact. So Jesus says blessed are the meek. When it comes to the Ego vs God battle things are the pretty much opposite of what the Ego wants.

   

The Syndrome of Grasping.

 Now this is very much what the Western world is built upon!

Two stages.

(1) So we can probably remember that moment when we first dreamed of something important we wanted or someone important, or heard about it, or met them.

From that moment onwards our life was different. We had a focus and a goal. Perhaps it was just a new mobile phone our friend had, or something more significant like our future spouse.

Now this is actually a very interesting situation. At one moment we are free and without the burning desire, and the next our life is taken over by a focus, goal or quest.

Now they say in the East that the "wise value peace over pleasure" and this runs into problems with us, we don't really agree with that or like to hear it. Especially in the West where our life seems meaningless unless we have some new thing or are on a quest to get some new thing, or we are enjoying the clutches of something we have like our prize vintage car, our house or our family.

This I will call "Grasping." That experience of being focused to something tangible, that we may not quite be able to hold in our hand yet but we are in search for it and we think we know what it is.

When Bono sings "Still haven't found what I'm looking for" the key issue is a need to grasp, but exactly what is not quite clear yet. Perhaps disappointments have confused exactly what we think we now need to grasp.

Similarly Carly Rae Jepsen sings in the famous song "Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad." There is a need to grasp before we even find what we are going to grasp. And this comes about because of failed graspings before. We saw something we liked, grabbed for it and missed and this sets up a grasping in early childhood that we then seek to complete.

Childhood innocence is a special place. We are largely free from grasping, we are not full of complex dreams and desires and we do not have a history of failures to confuse us in our grasping.

This time before we find something to grasp is actually very very special indeed! And it is something that we should value.

SO why do we NOT value that time before we grasp?

(2) Well how does it feel? When people say life is pointless, nothing is worthwhile, the drugs don't work anymore it is because they are exhausted by grasping. But faced with a life without goals and objects of desire and love is completely depressing.

With no one to love and nothing to do I will rot as a pointless and irrelevant, sad and lonely creature.

But in fact this is complete nonsense. This is what a being habituated to grasping feels!

Go back to that time before the need to grasp, what was life like? It was exactly the same. The sun comes up whether we have a quest or not, whether we are in love and grasping for someone, whether there is someone else grasping for us. Grasping makes no difference.

Chivalrous Love is throw back to the days of the Mediaeval court, knights and jousting. Monty Python's "In Search of the Holy Grail" is some funny because it mocks the great quests of Chivalrous Knights. To be an upper class man in those days you needed an heroic purpose to prove yourself. Some quest or battle to make a name. And this spilled over into love and the idea of idealised females that could become heroic quests in them self. The very last thing the Knight wants is a prostitute who will throw herself at him and end the quest.

Now the Modern West is still very much infected with this way of thinking. We each think we need a quest to make our life worthwhile and to prove ourselves. We need something to grasp, or at least a quest to get a grasp on it.

And why is this?

What struggles with the idea that the Sun will rise and laugh at our futile quests like we do King Arthur and his knights in Monty Python?

The problem is "ME"

At the heart of all this is a "ME" that is trying to prove itself, come into existence and make a name for itself in the world.

All this exhausting grasping is just trophy hunting for a SELF that needs to prove it exists.

Well if the self exists then why trophy hunt? And if it doesn't then why trophy hunt?

This is why we hate peace and like pleasure. Pleasure, and the celebration of grasping of Landing on Moon or whatever, enables the self to prove itself. Peace stops it doing this, and it hates peace and will try to make noise and distraction to stop peace. This is why the Americans like Guns and War I think.

If we want an heroic quest it is this. Stop! Stop grasping and just look at the open and empty hand and feel the need and the want and the depression and all the things that drive us forward and just Stop.

Nor forever, but just now.

Now it takes a lot of practice to stop grasping because we have been doing it for so long. It is like the smoker who instinctively grasps for a cigarette and lights it before even realising they did it.

Mindfulness is having the awareness necessary to see what is going on, to be able to watch the hand grasping for things and to stop it and contemplate what it feels like not to grasp.

Now the experience that we get, that one before we met our love or our quest in life, the one the busy self runs away from: that experience feels bad to begin with. It can feel destabilising and frightening if we go into it. The problem is that freedom is boundless and for someone used to holding tight to things it is very uncomfortable. So we take it in stages.

But the end of grasping when the hand is fully open, relaxed and at peace that is called Emptiness. Once our struggling self has realised that having things and quests is not that important after all, it gets to a point where it is okay to explore not grasping. A new kind of grasping to begin with. Because obviously the grasping being can only think in terms of grasping. So it grasps at religion, or spirituality or meditation or enlightenment . But this is okay, many small steps is all it takes.

Ultimately when we realise that there is nothing to grasp and the hand falls open that experience we suddenly realising is amazing. We realise just how much energy we expend in holding on to the world. And all of it completely unnecessarily.

Now this does not mean the hand is useless. We don't cut it off! It is okay to hold things. Its okay to have a quest in life and a wife and family. It is just the grasping which is the problem, and the feeling we have to grasp that hides us from the greater truth that we don't need to grasp at all, and have a perfectly valid existence beyond what we grasp.

Now this may seem easy. But when we say grasp we mean EVERYTHING we grasp. They still talk of reincarnation in the East (and used to in the West). What reincarnation is is the development of grasping to the body! We become someone not when we are born, but when we grasp! It is this desire to become someone or something that continues through our life and sets up all the out of control exhausting totally life dominating grasping. When in fact a born being is just a born being - it is born, it lives and it dies. That is all our birth, life and death is. Amazing, extraordinary and magical but completely free and nothing there to grasp. Death only becomes an issue once we have started holding on to things like possession, people and ideas about our self. Then we start filling tombs with all our possessions and memories because we have grasped so much and can't let go even at death. Imagine how exhausting and poor those lives carrying all this stuff around so tightly grasping that we can't even let go at death! What weary lives those ancient Egyptian Kings must have lived! How ironic that today we think they were spiritual and full of wisdom! They were full of grasping and non-freedom.