On the importance of not grasping

Bodhidharma, the famous monk who during the 5th or 6th century AD brought Buddhism to China, said in his teaching that the essence of it all was not to grasp. Just don't grasp -- and you're where you need to be.

What does not grasping mean? It means relaxation. Allowing. Withdrawing. Letting go of effort. Letting go of intention towards everything -- towards the outside world, and just as much towards one's own state of mind. It is, in the parlance of Vedanta, surrender.

Why is it important? When you do not grasp, you give up as much as possible the efforts that keep the mind running in its usual way. The mind grows quiet. In the quiet mind the Self is clearly reflected.

Is it the same as acceptance? I think not. Acceptance implies an affirmative act: a willingness, an accommodation, a giving up of hatred or desire. Not grasping does not do those things. It allows hatred to be where it is and desire to be where it is. It does not grasp them -- nor does it grasp the need to reconcile, accept, or forgive. It lets them all go.

It must be admitted that not grasping -- for the seeker -- does grasp at one thing. It grasps at itself. It does require effort -- minimal, but still significant, crucial -- to not grasp, to surrender. As a seeker one still feels "**I** surrender." And that feeling of doership means the feeling of effort.

So why not "not grasp" "not grasping" itself? This is precisely what the Self does, in fact, and is always doing. The Self does not bother whether one surrenders or not, whether one is ignorant or not, unhappy or not. It is serene and itself in all situations.

From the seeker's standpoint, however, ignorance and unhappiness are precisely what is unacceptable. While in the end it turns out that these are illusory, imagined problems -- until one sees that, one must pretend that they are not. The seeker must grasp not grasping.

Do not grasp anything but not grasping. Surrender all but surrender itself.

The magic tricks the Self plays (3 min audio)

How is it possible that the Self conceals itself so cleverly right within our view?

The uses and abuses of metaphysics in the spiritual search

By metaphysics I mean speculation in words about the nature of ultimate reality, and a lot of other related things: the nature of God, time, creation, death, the self, and so on.

The Buddha didn't believe in metaphysics. He felt it was a distraction. When you have an arrow stuck in you, he said, do you ask who shot it and why and where the arrow came from. What you want, he said, is a destruction of your prior metaphysical belief systems, which are all wrong anyhow. The only beliefs that really mattered were ones about suffering and how to end it.

The Hindus did not agree. The great Vedantic teacher Sankara had a lot of metaphysical opinions about the nature of the Self and the world and their relationship.

I believe metaphysics can be useful if used correctly. Why is it useful?

• It can correct misconceptions that would otherwise close someone off  to the spiritual search. For instance, if someone believes that the universe is made of insentient, dead matter, and that that is all there is -- why would they believe that there might be something more, not limited that way, that might be known?
• It can give people a big picture of where they're heading in the spiritual search. Knowing the attributes of the Self as pure consciousness, pure being, and pure bliss -- though they are  imprecise --  the seeker can better distinguish between what is closer to the goal and what is farther away.
• It can help quiet the intellectual mind. Certain temperaments, including mine, cannot engage in the spiritual quest without understanding WHY. We can't take things on much faith. For us, we need rational answers and arguments. Metaphysics can provide them.

But metaphysics can also be abused:

• One can get absorbed in the intellectual arguments without ever moving beyond them. The arguments do go on endlessly.
• More importantly, one can mistake the words for the reality. All the mystical traditions teach that the ultimate reality is beyond words. Words are just pointers, just guides, and they should not lead a seeker to focus on them rather than their own experience.

All in all, metaphysics can be an extremely helpful instrument in the spiritual journey provided it is seen for what it is: an instrument that aids in navigation -- a map, not the territory itself. 

The mind's knowing vs. direct knowing

The mind wants to know everything in a few different, limited ways: through sight, sound, hearing, taste, and smell, through feeling and through thinking. That's basically how the mind wants to know. It wants to know something as a thing.

And so the mind tries to figure out the Self as a thing. But the Self is not a thing. It can be known only when the mind is still. The Self can only be known through itself -- a direct means which is not a mental means. It knows itself because its very being is its knowing. It's not like a mind knowing an object. The Self is a knowing. But it's not a knowing of. It's simply knowing itself. But not as an object of knowledge.

This is an utterly unique way of knowing, one that is completely foreign to every kind of knowledge the mind understands.

The mind can't fathom that. It tries to put the Self into its own mental terms. And so it comes up with feelings, comes up with pictures.

When the mind is quiet the Self is experienced without the overlay of mental things that usually obscure it, but that experience is not a mental experience in the usual sense of that term. But the mind still tries to make it so. And so it analogizes.

It says: the Self is felt as a kind of vast substance holding the the mind, which is a tiny image. That the Self is "that which watches" the mind. Or that the Self is bliss or peace.

Strictly speaking, none of these are true. The Self is indescribable, except to say that it is, and that its being and its knowing are one and the same.

The mind also wants to take credit. "I know the Self," it wants to say. But the mind can never know the Self. Rather, the mind quieting itself reveals the Self which knows the Self. To whom or what is that revelation? It must be admitted: to none other than the mind. After all, the Self knows itself eternally. To itself, it cannot be "revealed" or "hidden."

But the mind "knows" the Self as the mind's own not knowing, its beyond. It knows itself as the end of its own functioning. The mind closes its eyes in the temple and is overwhelmed with awe and it calls that its experience of "knowing." It is only its experience of being utterly humbled. 

The mind knows the Self as the ungraspable, the unthinkable. Only it cannot accept that.

So the mind insists on continuing to put things in its own way of knowing. Which is fine: that's the nature of mind.

You can't just get from here to there. Unless you can.

In psychoanalysis, a client resists getting better. If they weren't somehow getting something out of their current way of being, they wouldn't keep it. That way of being provides some utility or protection. So it fights for its survival by resisting change. And so therapists must point out, at the surface level, that resistance, even as they also attempt to delve deeper. These surface resistances often manifest in the client's interactions with the therapist over what seem to be other issues. And as one layer of resistance is pointed out and softened, another, deeper one, often arises -- until the point when the client is ready to deal with the deeper issues.

It's like an archaeological dig. You can't go directly to the deepest layer. You must start with the top and strip one layer away after another.

So it is with the spiritual search.

What prevents us from progressing in the spiritual search, and often in life, is that we are aligned with our own desire. The ultimate misalignment is our belief that we can get what we want from somewhere out there rather than from our own being. 

Yet our current mode of desiring resists deep change. So we must address it at the surface levels, where it interacts with daily life. We have to be honest about what we want in every sphere of our life. We must peel away our illusions about our own desires, even if that reveals we want things that "we" (i.e. our nagging should and should-not thoughts) disapprove of.

How do we do that? There are many ways (therapy can help!). This is one:

1. Find some dissatisfaction with a particular area of your life (it could be something very small, like what you drink for breakfast in the morning) .
2. Try to write or speak about just what is so dissatisfying about it.
3. Imagine some new scenarios that might address this dissatisfaction. As you imagine each one, write or speak out loud how you feel about them.
4. Experiment with attempting, at least in small ways, a new possibility that seems promising.
5. Write or speak about how you feel about it.
6. If it feels more aligned with you, that's progress. If not, rinse and repeat.

So it's an iterative process of discovery. We cannot necessarily depend on spirituality to take us directly out of the game until we are ready for it. Rather, we must pursue the spiritual game in parallel with the alignment of ourselves with our deeper desires.

Being in greater alignment with our desires is like dealing with resistances in therapy. It is necessary before the deeper issues can be effectively dealt with. Without progressive alignment to desire, the mind is usually not quiet enough to grasp the Truth. It doesn't desire it enough.

"Where is God?" asks the mind. It can and cannot know the answer.

Hindu mythology tells of the story of a devout young prince, Prahlada, who is the son of a mighty and vicious king. The prince is pious and believes in the existence of God. The king does not, and is upset about this "God" who his son dares to think is more important than him. One day the king strikes a pillar and asks -- "Where is your God?" The pillar splits apart and out comes an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu -- Narasimha, the fearsome half-man, half-lion.

The point is that God -- by which we mean nothing other than the true Self -- is in everything, whether we see it or not. This true Self is nothing less or other than pure Being. As such, it is known only in and by the silence of the mind. The mind, like the king, wants to know where  this God is, who this God is, how it can be seen? Prove it! It's like the fish insisting it wants to see water. In fact it sees it everywhere; it simply cannot recognize it because there is nothing against which to contrast it.

Funnily enough, the parable of Prahlada expresses the paradox of this. God can be seen -- but perhaps not in the form that you want! The God that can be seen -- the sacred beast -- is good to his devotees and harsh to his enemies. That God is, for all its fierceness, limited to a particular manifestation.

The God that is not seen with the eyes of the mind is the god that is pure peace and satisfaction, that is beyond limits. It is known when the mind is still, and is pure fullness, pure emptiness.

To know this God, as Prahlada did even before Narasimha appeared, the mind must humble itself, must quiet itself. It is that very quiet, in which the mind humbly closes its eyes and relaxes, that is the presence of God or the Self. It is known not through the mind's instruments but directly, in and through itself its own light.