The root of grasping is wanted to directly control experience. You eat a chocolate chip cookie because you associate a feeling with it. That feeling, when you get it, feels like control. The one led to the other, and that reliable connection is grasping in some ways. Because it may not work every time, or work the same way, and that feels like pain, since something is now missing or gone, which was never promised to you in the first place.
So much of life is spent trying to stop time, and trying to create constancy. Several comment on this occurred to me that I will share.
A bunker is a cage you chose. We hate cages since we want to move, but if we don’t want to move, then cages don’t matter. As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “those who do not move do not notice their chains”. She also said “Freedom is for those who think differently”, which also implicitly says that Freedom is unnecessary for conformists.
Grasping is a bunker we create that becomes a cage. In all the pain of the world, the demands, the distractions, we all forget that something good and better underlies all appearances. Remembering this in one way or another is the primary task of all spiritualities. In my own view, there is no difference between Allah, the Great Spirit of most American Indian tribes (maybe all: I wonder if any were atheists? It’s not impossible. There was much cultural diversity), and Buddha Nature and the Tao. It’s the That. If you feel it it needs no name. If you don’t, then no name suffices or matters.
I think it is childish to NEED someone else. One hears so many songs more or less equating needing someone with loving them. Here is the thing: children NEED parents, particularly a mother or mother surrogate. Adults should not need another person any more than a grown adult needs a pacifier or to be put to bed at night.
Love is building. A beautiful marriage builds both partners. And of course it is natural that you would miss your building partner when they are gone. But that is not need. That is affection given out, and perhaps the greatest loss is someone to whom you can readily GIVE. This need is what motivates so many parents to elongate their children’s adolescence indefinitely. They need their kids, more than their kids need them. This is childish, immature, undignified, socially dangerous, and in my view morally wrong.
And it occurs to me to comment that we all need Yeses to balance lifes many No’s. One way of getting them easily is deciding halfway to do something, like giving up donuts, then TREATING yourself to them. Indulging yourself. You set up the No so you can set up the Yes, which is otherwise empty. I think a lot of behavioral circles have this component in them.
I have a lot of notes I’ve taken over the past while. I’ve been working quite hard in the money world, and not posting them here. I’ve also been enjoying the rest. It’s likely true that words that can be said are not usually the words that really matter. That won’t stop me from doing it anyway, but one day, if I grow up myself, I will talk myself silent.