Grasping
Grasping is an ego response to fear borne from awareness. It’s about highlighting what you are holding on to. It is about an understanding of Anicca/ Anitya – not only that this too will pass, but it is also about the moment, about the being, the presence. All of this is here then gone. All is impermanent. Grasping is trying to stop the inevitable, trying to make something that can’t be owned your own. What you are left with is disappointment, so you hold on to that.
We become addicted to our stories, but this is not our life. They are just our life situations. We love the drama; it entices us to believe in this idea of ‘self’ – a person in their situation from one specific perspective. Is it any surprise that Drama sounds very much like the term dharma – the way of life, the practice of behaviours that reinforce belief. Drama is the STORY of these behaviours. Unless you are on stage you are not enacting them and if you are on stage, it is a very rare performer that can enact them as authentic experience.
Our resistance is what we hang on to and generally comes back to the reason of fear. Even pride is merely the fear of not being important. Anger the fear of losing that which makes us individual, fear of the other, the threat. But we are not important and there is no other than what we create.
To continue the image of trying to attach and cling on to all that is impermanent, imagine the resistance is something that you are desperately clutching – a physical discomfort, an intrusive thought, judgement, expectation. If it is a concept, it has no physical form and is therefore only stuck in your mind. If you had a transparent mind, it would fall straight through as insubstantial as smoke. If your body was not affected by your mind, it would equally allow physical sensation to flow through.
This does not mean ignoring these things as they occur because in order to dismiss something you need to oppose it, to take a position in contrast to it and this means reinforcing the individual and separate. An argument implies two sides in dialectic, while acceptance means standing off this line.
To solve it is not to oppose it but resolve the harmony or wa between two conflicting forces.
It is not a ‘bad’ thing. There is no bad thing. Many times, the negative is the reset, which is essential for the next wave, where it is the inspiration for the preferred outcome. It is merely a thing that itself will come and go. The way we deal with it now will determine whether it remains as a resentment in the future. Only those that accept it fully and engage it completely in the moment can expect it to pass through our experience leaving nothing but the wake of our further movement toward awakening.
Consider the extremity of those that have lost everything, had a severe infirmity or are close to death – these people come to the realisation of what is important in life.
