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.