The irony of Letting Go is we try to Grab it

So last night I think the My Muse episode is over. I simply dreamt of her with someone else and walked away. As simple as that.

This places me interestingly with the same feeling I had in the month before meeting her. I had stowed away on a stolen blow up camping mattress and sailed off down an alpine river for an hour or so. Lying on my side I could peer into the crystal clear aqua-marine water sometimes seeing the rocks of the river bed close and sometimes seeing them drop away and hide beneath an inky blanket. Above the water the river snaked through trees and boulders, wide, narrow and then raft fast over rapids and then without warning drifting into a tranquil eddy where it would glide around as if resting before until pulled back into the main excitement of the flow. Following and feeling the character of the river with all its little whims unfolding drew me into a very deep tranquillity that stayed with me for months afterwards... until I met my muse in fact.

Now it appears this is the process of letting go. But what do we do with letting go? Well the first thing is to acknowledge it and try to hold it. We like this new relaxation and so naturally we switch to hoarding behaviour and we try to fix it and grasp it so we can have it for the future. Then some anxiety about losing it and we hold ever tighter and the great irony then that habitual behaviours complete corrupt it.

We may even think about sharing with other people. Wow this great if only other people could let go. So we try to package it so we can give it like a product. Here would be a classic way that the very thought of Capitalism automatically corrupts. No matter how compassionate our intention, the idea of giving something that we have grasped will defeat it at source.

My childhood experience of access concentration and possibly Jhana and Infinite Space was immediately defeated by exactly this. "I've had this amazing experience" I announced to my father. And this was not just a feature of language. I had had this. I grasped it without even knowing and I owned it. No matter how much I wished that other should understand this and I made an instinctive vow to never take a step again that I could not explain for others. The grasping, ownership and giving were all tainted by the picking up of something: not the letting go!

How can you maintain letting go, and how do you give it? You do not grasp! There is nothing to pick up. There is only the putting down.

How do you teach putting down? Well that was Buddha's challenge. I once heard it said that breathing meditation is miraculous because it teaches us to let go, but first teaching us to grasp at the breath.

When all you have is grasping how do you learn letting go?

Well this is the mystery. Most often an instruction to let go, is really something we grasping,. And if we take steps to do it, they too will be grasped. Maybe we write them as code of conduct and adhere obsessively.

But when we do let go, it is different. Our hand is empty.