I sometimes clearly sense the world’s most frightful thing: large, invisible, far & close. The Great Grasping is the name that I call it, but it has many names, given by many who’ve glimpsed it from very different angles. I always believe this frightful thing is there, running through me, and through you, but only sometimes do I feel truly aware of it. Perhaps you sense the thing I am referring to, but probably less powerfully than it merits. Historians of the future may see The Great Grasping as the puppet master who, through the bodies and minds of modern humans, tightly grasped something called “the real world” even while this logic caused first crucial elements of the actual world to disappear ─ North Pole and Great Barrier Reef and even the seasons ─ and then caused civilisation to collapse. Yet, we are mostly blind to it.
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I first got a clear sense that this something was there, when it suddenly became absent, in the first few seconds of arriving with Nayay to his boyhood home. Three US Army officers, James, Don & Buck, had declared a visit to our Masai friend’s home, his “Boma”, to be official business worthy of a quick long weekend trip through a land with no roads in a quarter-of-a-million-dollar Humvee, taking me along and an off-kilter Norwegian friend. Nayay was a free spirit who had hiked away from the Boma enticed by tales of cities and fantastic sights, taking up a job as a guard in Dar-es-Salaam.
As we arrived, young men recognised Nayay and came towards us at full speed with gliding strides and rows of embracing familial eyes like I’d not seen on any visit to the house of any friend. Children slowly formed around the halted Hummer, making it clear that they’d never seen an automobile by their fascination with their own reflections in the chrome. I directed their attention to the rear view mirror, and they nearly fainted with glee, lining up and politely taking turns looking, some returning to the end of the line after a fair-feeling time, like an amusement park ride.
I turned around and watched a herdman and his cows walking, together, in effortlessly synchronized smooth paces. Time slowed. Something in their gait said the cows were family as much as property before Nayay said as much in words (funny, I’d been told that farmers don’t care about their cows.) The animals are bled and milked but killed only in drought, or for the most special of occasions and Nayay’s return was one such occasion. A young goat who, it was suspected, would soon be food for a predator if not us was selected. The Masai had heard white men eat meat often but most don’t kill any animals. They could not understand it and asked us to kill the goat, the Norwegian was selected to do the honors. I sat next to him as he sawed in a clumsy frenzy through the jugular of a pathetically braying young goat clenched between his grasping legs. Blood and shock covered his face and body. I remember being glad at not having to do it, and also quite envious of being able to finally know profoundly that I had killed a closer relative of mine than a fish in order to eat it (of course I’ve killed many cows, but it is deeply difficult to know this profoundly, given the way I’ve killed them). The Masai laughed uproariously, but their laughter soon yielded to respect for the dead and the trauma of the new killer, and they consoled him, as they knew that taking a life was hard.
Earnest Hemingway described an encounter with Masai: “They had that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from. That attitude you only get from the best of the English, the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards ... It is an ignorant attitude and the people who have it do not survive, but very few pleasanter things ever happen to you than the encountering of it.”
The macho Hemingway might not have admitted my feeling of looking in rows of clear connecting eyes and being unable to meet them, like the beauty of nature whose embrace I knew from childhood, but which my mind was too full to see, even if I wanted to. Hemingway, my fellow Chicagoan, was speaking confidently from the center of the Great Grasping, which was still so dazzling with its powerful automobiles and airplanes and its dreams of unfettered progress. Some in the long-lived Masai tribe are still quite unaware of what we think is the real world1, where people think they are savages, or noble savages 2.
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But what exactly is this thing that separates us from the Masai and inspires many names and a vague, deep dread? These are my reflections as a “blind man” addressed to my fellow blind people, as in the famed Indian parable: A group of blind people encounter an elephant and decide to understand what it is by feeling it from different positions. Its side, trunk, legs, tail, ear and tusk are respectively felt by the blind people to be a wall, a snake, trees, a rope, a fan and a spear. A rising number of people are realizing that they have spent their life in contact with a strange super-organism, but can’t see the whole of it3. We can forgive ourselves for being confused because it does not have a definite boundary, like skin, to feel, but we are in it. If we listen to each other’s voices we can get some sense of this thing, though it is possible that no human has ever seen anything like it clearly.
Let me explain: here are some descriptions that this terrible elephant-dwarfing muse has inspired among my fellow blind people: The Wetiko virus that has spread among Westerners making cannibals out of its victims (given by Jack Forbes, quoting Native American myth4), The Simulation that we live in (Baudrillard), the growing disconnection5 which is at the source of The Great Unravelling of our civilisation (by Joanna Macy), Moloch who is “The sphinx” which is an “incomprehensible prison!” (Allan Ginsberg6), Iain McGilchrist’s proposal that a pathological hall of mirrors has trapped westerners in a “left-brained world”. It is also the great slave ship that Bayo Akomolafe finds us all binding each other in. These tales bear a family resemblance, while employing many metaphors. Yet their terrible inspirer lurks mostly unrealised. Not because those describing it lack wisdom or skill but because humans are not gifted with a sense that can “see” this thing as a whole. When I feel drawn to honor the elusiveness of the thing I call The Grasping, I call it The Terrible Muse.
But mainly I call it The Great Grasping because I experience its most powerful features to be a personal desire for certainty about and in control of things (to grasp), and a vague feeling (shared by others) of being personally controlled by something powerful. Zombie stories and the Matrix also echo this unsettling mystery, as does the unnamed lurking darkness that dominates in David Lynch’s movies, only showing itself in surreal forms. These works help us collectively and playfully share the feeling of being trapped together, without having a theory or something material to act against.
Another set of perspectives fix upon a particular face of The Great Grasping, a particular kind of host of the grasping that can be identified and resisted. The patriarchy, Capitalism, whiteness, and the .1% are examples. These faces of The Grasping are focused on by people who are grasped at by this face, respectively, women who men try to control, those feeling powerless in wage slavery, those held as inferior by white supremacy, and people who’ll never be rich. The situation is quite lucidly expressed by sculpture of the Dadaist and Cubists, who knew they were surrounded by a collective mania of explanation (“grasping”), and offered objects which were different things from different angles, prompting the question of whether the objects were all of what the appear to be or none of it, and frustrating a conventional answer. Ironically, the mania that inspired them is such an object. People who have this madness worst want a definite name ─ they also want to know “the meaning of Art” not to hold a puzzle in their head. People who use the terms I’ve just mentioned above vary immensely in their love of puzzles and appreciation of subtlety. Which makes it hard to speak to one another, like at the tower of Babel.
People who desire quite concrete explanations for the constricting feeling of modern life find them in various visions of 500 men in a room, QAnon, the perpetrators of Pizza-gate, David Icke’s lizard rulers, or the vision of The West that political islamists hold. Conservatives put liberals at the source of grasping, murderous muslims put murderous Westerners. No kind of ego likes to admit to being at the center of The Grasping (though most egos are) because The Grasping threatens every ego’s destruction, as every ego (infected with The Grasping or not) possesses a body whose vitality is being grasped at by others who want more than they need. These perspectives, when seen as “the truth” do not allow their host minds to see The Grasping in its mysterious form and so do little but aid its spread.
If we are to respond to this Terrible Muse, we blind people must use all our ways of sensing: imaginal, intellectual, subjective experience, mythical and mystical 7. These last three subtle senses demand, for their engagement, that the muse is allowed to be an acknowledged mystery, not to be completely deciphered. It is akin to the gods of our pagan ancestors, daemons, or chimeras. When approaching great mysteries, conceptual knowledge is most valuable alongside a deep willingness to be ignorant. If that sounds crazy, maybe that’s why The Grasping stays invisible: it addicts its hosts to kinds of knowledge that it does not provide about itself.
Please start by taking a moment to be curious about what Buddhist call “grasping” — your own direct experience of it. This is the subjective substance out of which The Great Grasping is woven. Our experience of grasping is not “evil”, it is simply a basic quality of subjective consciousness, a “primary color” of the palette of experience. It is part of being alive. Actually needily grasping with our hand is one act during which we feel this sensation, but the feeling of grasping runs throughout our conscious life: the more heavily we expect our partner to scratch our back, or need a chinese restaurant to deliver tonight, the more the feeling of grasping is present. Grasping comes when we “become attached to” sensations of pleasure that we experience, and develop expectations of experiencing similar pleasures and more of them. These heavy expectations easily turn to anxiety, anger, depression or frustration. Feelings of expectation come to surround our desirable sensations and our whole route to them ─ the sweetness of the fruit is lovely, and we want it again, and so we come to heavily expect to see the form of the fruit that gives us the sweet tastes, to find stores we can buy it at, and to have money we buy it with. Ultimately as we grasp at more fruit, more sex, more power, and other pleasurable things, we also grasp at the thoughts, plans, futures, or views which are our ways of getting these things. Our ego is made up of these routes to pleasure.
We can expect things that are stable and present without suffering, like a child can hold on to a very attentive mother with ease and confidence, becoming “securely attached”, and even taking the mother for granted and forgetting to be grateful for her. However, if we want to grasp fleeting or unavailable things, things which may even have plans of their own, then we must grasp to control. And this sort of grasping comes with un-ease or anxiety. Striving for skills in controlling, making and building are part of life, are not evil, but needing to take all chaos “out of the equation” means not just un-ease but “dis-ease” because nothing is totally sure. Humans have gotten used to being able to grasp the fruits of the labors of the earth’s lifeforms, of expecting and receiving immense pleasures that have become so reliable that we take them for granted, and forget them. But we ourselves are also part of what is grasped as well and we want to grasp freedom. So there is dis-ease.
The thing that I call The Grasping has arisen from a very special pattern of normal human grasping which has become effective at replicating itself. By deeply inhabiting our own grasping subjectively we are in touch with the thread (the metaphorical DNA or protein) that holds this pattern together and holds us inside the pattern. But to deepen our collective inhabiting of The Grasping, we must tell each other our stories.
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Meeting the Masai made the strangeness of my real world obvious, but only hinted at its darkness. Listening to the stories of Native American tribes, who have long experienced the other side of the superorganism can teach us some of the respect due to a real daemon. The white men seemed, to some Native Americans, to have a dis-ease previously known to them ─ Wetiko was the Algonquin word for it, other tribes had their own names. The Native American tribes had long experienced a threat from specters who wanted to possess minds, and who made those possessed minds want to possess and control others’ minds. Those taken among the natives were few, but this affliction was observed to be rife among White Men, causing them to try to live off the energy of others8. The white men’s seemingly limitless capacity for treachery, and will to exterminate the populations of North America, earned them the name “the people with no heart9” in other Native American tongues..
I can try to deny being a descendant of the Native Americans’ killers ─ my biological ancestors were recent, poor Irish and Slavic immigrants, fishermen & farmers. But the contents of the American founders’ minds came into my mind by way of schools which teach history from a particular perspective, countrymen who attended those same schools, newspapers, songs and conversation. I do not see these ancestors as evil, but they were mad with The Grasping.
I grew up in the vacuum left in the wake of The Grasping’s grand swipe across the North American continent in suburban Chicago. The city’s name means wild onions in the language of the Algonquin tribes that were displaced by Europeans who’d seen a chance to form a continent according to their dreams. There are now 8 million Chicagoans with almost all of their family lines crossing here sooner than 150 years ago as they came for material wealth. Much of the smell of wild onions has been chased away by pavement since I’ve been alive.
I remember the chill that ran down my spine one night in high school as my brother and I drove, lost, through a suburban labyrinth in a thick fog, looking for a new friend’s house. We were looking for Navajo Lane, and watched Sioux St., Blackhawk Dr., Miami St, and native name after native name slowly emerge from and return to the mist. It felt spooky in a way that fog did not when it came to our own labyrinth where the streets were named after natural features, many of which had been filled in or paved over since I was born (our street was Lakeview.) We found our friend’s house and went inside to play war games set in fantasy realms.
No mind that let the true bloody significance of American colonisation out of the mist, could also hold the Wetiko of the Native Americans’ murderers. If my brother and I did not know, in our bones, that we have our founding fathers Wetiko, the natives’ names and past acts against them would not haunt us. But understanding the meaning of colonization fully would mean seeing Native Americans’ humanity fully, and this would require my inherited mind to see its own destructive consequences lucidly. At which point my will to live might have to reject Wetiko (The Grasping) from my organism, like a virus, and it might die. The true life inside of us knows there was no special appetite on the part of The Grasping for the Native Americans (it has consumed all kinds of lives.) The slow onset of The Grasping dis-ease, the penetration of this field of grasping into deeper parts of our being, is deeply confused with adulthood in Western countries. In the most infected parts of the world, “adults” even lose the ability to dance.
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So my ego is a bag of inherited thoughts and actions that bring vast pleasures, and my instinct to grasp these pleasures causes me to grasp the ego. The ego expands its thoughts to fill up my mind and even my body. An act of will cannot resolve this trap ─ it is the kind of thing that wisdom traditions address through deepest insight.
The simplest way of expressing the most basic necessary insight is “I am not my thoughts.” I am a host, in a history of many, of the grasping, which is intertwined with the ego that has grown inside of me, made of material transmitted between many before. When I truly see this I take a clear step to freedom. Some might worry that this somehow absolves our egos of moral responsibility. It does not, The Grasping is in us, even if it is not us. Seeing this clearly is a major step to treating others like humans. The strategy of morally punishing The Grasping will simply not work; a society of grasping minds will not punish themselves into obedience to our deepest moral sense. Our morality, our ideas about equality, has been used by our grasping minds primarily as a means of protecting ourselves, from those who have greater power, rather than treating others as equals.
The mind that is identified with the grasping must offer itself understanding, if it is to heal. We are up against something powerful, and can’t take it lightly or hate ourselves for being too weak to oppose it. The opposite of grasping is letting go, and letting go of the idea of individual victory against The Grasping is crucial. In Native American legend, Wetiko was a spirit that usually hid in the night or in forests, but our similar legends, like the Zombie myth, have us surrounded by a similar spirit. This is because these legends’ muse has evolved to reproduce itself by grasping and shaping material in such a way that it grasps and shapes minds into more grasping minds. This is one reason why I do not call The Terrible Muse by the name Wetiko, because the Muse has mutated, creating more powerful means of contagiousness, the most powerful seem benign. I speak here of commercials, the molesting neon fingers of shop windows signs, and smart phone alerts, social connections went into the shape of fish hooks. These are part of The Grasping, our minds do not stop in our skull, are not separate from the world, both poets, mystics, and lately many scientists say. Our environment, which is inseparable from our mind, is part of the grasping. The acts of my culture that are most easily called cannibalism show most clearly that we are ill, but if I am to be responsive to this insight I must see how deep the rot runs in me, and how subtly.
Luckily, as children we are not full of The Grasping. Though children are born grasping, they are never born with a pathological addiction to grasping such that their own inner world, including the interior of their body at resting state, is a mass of tightly held feeling, of muscle tension. Infants are not stuck in “the real world” ; they do not see themselves as either successes or failures, high or low status: as carpenters, bank tellers, or engineers, by and large. Childhood is our means of understanding being outside.
The subtler forms that The Grasping has taken in the times of computers are also gentler than it took in the conquistadors. Westerners do not need think of ourselves as controlling people in order to have pleasures at our command, we are surrounded by technology that does more than armies of slaves could. But, in order for things to be under control, we have to be under control, we have to act as parts in the production process are expected to, to be interchangeable parts in the engine of commerce, or “value chains”. This includes whether we alarm or disturb, motivate or distract others. We ourselves are part of a workplace technology that uses “human resources”. Workplace expectations seep uncomfortably deeply into our soul, but “after hours”, in our free time, we can be in control in a large home.
Westerners’ dancing stops at the same time as their minds get filled with words that conjure feelings of knowing and control, phrases like “define that”, “one sentence summary”, “take-home messages”, “the point”, “the deliverable”,”my brand”, and “team-building exercises” that turn life into things and mystery into pieces that can be held in the palm of one’s hand.
Large rigid blocks of muscle tension form on my body when I remember saying these words without irony, the kinds of large tensions that turn the body into separate blocks that can be represented and arranged consciously as part of a plan. The blocks can be frozen in place when we live life as a metaphor such as putting the weight of the world on our shoulders, or striding confidently towards a destination of partner at the law firm. These blocks of tension make dancing hard, they are the mind grasping the body, or The Grasping grasping the mind and the body, as a puppet master would.
Dancing is as human as it gets, it is about surrender to rhythm and in “the real world” the thought of it is paralyzing. The young Michael Jackson, in Thriller, which took Reagan’s America by storm, showed his prowess by getting the zombies to dance, us kids did spins with Jackson, our parents spun only vicariously. There was perhaps no more powerful sense of The Grasping hold on me than when as a young adult with a job and I stood wanting to dance but unable to. The extreme self-consciousness that froze me made my dancing ugly, which heightened my self-consciousness and uncoordination, which made me drink and drink and drink. And dance, finally. If you know these feelings, you know The Grasping in the most intimate possible way.
Another experience that we have in common is “the real world” which is the name of The Grasped for being inside of the grasping. To grasp something is to feel that it is real, and to attempt to live exclusively in the “real world” is to be a compulsive grasper. Dance clubs for graspers must be filled with props that make them into another world breaking the spell of the “real” one. This real world is one where things can be understood by means of what we already know.
A reassuring pleasure, security, is available with the predictable and familiar. The sense of reality is the sense of being reliably expected to be felt, heard, seen, smelled or touched in a certain way. When our expectation of sensations, our grasping after them, are reinforced consistently by experience, our expectations slowly become reality ─ the concrete feelings of being there that make up the world. The walls around you and ground under have reality results of your heavy and constantly met expectations since childhood that walls and ground are solid. As neutral as walking on the ground seems, being unsure of the ground under your feet is highly unpleasant.
When I spend a lot of time deeply in the spaces in this world where all goes according to plan (like the computer program behind the Matrix), then I find myself suddenly asking “is this real?” when things don’t go according to plan. For example I feel my lost keys are supposed to present themselves, the car is supposed to start (“this isn’t supposed to happen”). Things can’t always go according to plan in this ”real” world, but when accidents like this happen, they can still be understood and felt. The great accident, our slow creation of The Matrix, is not tangible. Many people who’ve seen the Muse find that what they can sense has no way of being named in language of “the real world” that they and their loved ones speak, it is inconceivable because it is not predictable or tangible, this makes it extremely sad, isolating or maddening to choose to be aware of The Muse (The Matrix.) It is easier not to feel it at all, and so for the most part, we don’t.
This attachment to the feeling of reality is amplified by predictable fast food and impossibly regular vegetables, being very sure of what is in front of you, and what sort of thing should happen next. A person captured by grasping is a stranger to imagination, fantasy, and mystery.
This is expressed in many ways, clinging rigidly onto possessions and opinions, to be sure about the truth of ideas you grasp, and through them to control our environment. A need to tell yourself that appearances are reality and that things are what they seem, is also fueled by a habit grasped, and refuses to know what it can’t grasp.
The commonly felt “hole”10 in modern life is the predictable consequence of “the real world” becoming too good at being real, too predictable to be felt. The feelings of expectations being met can be amazing, like when we have a good coffee after missing and craving one, or it can be a non-experience, as can happen when we always have coffee exactly when we like (seldom entering into deep craving). Our life is full of the later kind experience, and many things can be ignored like the ground. We cannot let ourselves believe that more consumption will not give us much more pleasure, because we cannot stop ourselves from consuming. This is why it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of The Grasping — we are addicted, and our addiction is synonymous with a sense of reality that stands in our inner life. The great emptiness is multiplied because, in a life of control, where we want our own music to be played at our preferred volume, there quickly stops being space for others.
The inability to dance, the real world, and the hole are experiences we “The Grasped” have in common but the growth of The Grasping within us is particular, unique. It is worth asking how much of a stretch it is really, to say that our individuality and identity is the way the Grasping grew in us? People have always entertained ideas of being separate from others, but our ideas are again peculiar. In order to fit into the current form of The Grasping we must each be graspable in some way, we must have an identity, a “thing” that we are and “our own life” that we live our way. To others our identity is a use, and to ourselves it largely a promise of an ability to control what happens to us in the game of life, under its rules. Many of us would prefer a life of organic freedom, like a rock star, but those jobs are rare. I chose to study the human condition, an occupation that seemed to offer respectable contact with the elusive mystery I yearned for, and to offer a way to act on my vague sense that something was amiss. This gave me a particular experience of The Grasping, one of a great many multitude.
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When I was young my father died after a seizure interrupted his control of a car, he went into a lake and his lungs filled with water. He was large, tough, charming, and full of contradictions, a Catholic school teacher who was very encouraging when as a four-year-old, I expressed incredulity at adult belief in God. He coached high school football teams to championships and cried when our dog died and had taken up a job building people’s dream homes to make money. So there I was in the thin social fabric of a newly built suburb and a vacuum of attention concerning impermanence and disintegration, with a mother who was very hurt, and angry at being left alone, suddenly without control with the dream life she’d been building with Dad gone. She loved us but did a lot of unhinged yelling. I mainly liked playing in the forest and drawing large murals of war scenes.
I remember the day I won my first vocabulary contest in the 4th grade. My inattentiveness had caused me to be demoted from the top-level english class in 3rd grade, and this ignominy had been undone to start the 4th grade but my mother, a teacher herself, still remembered that her boy’s aptitude had been doubted. I told my mother about my win, she put the breaks on while driving, stopping in the middle of the street. She beamed. I won the next 5 contests and broke the record for most wins in a year. My mind is trained to want to know, because being the mother of somebody who knows a lot can be an explanation of why you have value. In high school, many kids who hadn’t grown up with me thought I was on LSD all the time. I was born a little weird. My ability to know facts and understand ideas deepened as my explanation to myself and others for why I had value.
At University, vast theoretical vistas were laid out before me, and my performance got professors speaking to me like a little compatriot. I had space to scan the humanitarian calamities of the world, and since my ancestors fled Ireland in 1915 to avoid execution for rebellion against an empire, I was for underdogs and justice. I read Noam Chomsky and learned that colonization and exploitation hadn’t stopped, and that you could do(?) jobs understanding it. The University deeply lacked a certain vibrance, to be sure, but it was where the ideas were, and many bad important ideas in social science needed changing.
I knew it was an uphill battle, I thought harder and grasped after deeper truth that could not be resisted. I instinctively started walking in a more rigid and deliberate manner. A knot formed in the back of my head, level with my ears, and tensions across my shoulders, part of a general posture which I called the slog. I would find the answer that was out there in the rough unexplored terrain. I would understand why things were fucked up.
Those whose minds are full of thoughts that are respectable in American society have a straight and assured stride, like Tom Cruise. They walk in a direction they know is worth going, but this knowing is of a dis-easy kind that needs to be constantly reminded of itself by the stride that takes over their body and mind rather than coming from it. They are constantly progressing, even while walking to the toilet, because each step is part of a life-metaphor that is their attempt to grasp life itself, a view of their personal history as progress so firmly and constantly grasped that they cannot remember anything else. I slogged dis-easily to the toilet.
Rock musicians do not have an easy stride either, they get famous for fighting in primal fits against The Grasping that turns our body and souls into blocks. Often said to be Rebels without causes, they allow the wild part of their audience’s nature —the impulse to feeling and expression — to see itself expressed or reflected openly somewhere, even if it is at dark clubs at odd times11. Everybody knows on a vague gut level and nobody on an explicit level what rock stars are flailing against, and in the end The Grasping often wins. The artistry stemming from the soul gets praise which feeds the grasping of the artist after their self-idea: what it means to be Kurt Cobain or Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix, their place in history and the importance of their work to millions. They play their role by amping up their own capacity to rebel with drugs, and seducing fans with visions of freedom. They rebel in a way that creates just enough space for an apolitical unconscious space for life - rebels supposedly “without causes.” Life, vibrance, is the cause, but in grasping for it and appearing to succeed they make the Grasping only stronger. In some ways this resistance to The Grasping is the most straightforward. I preferred the route of the intellectual.
A dream signaled The Grasping’s strong and particular hold on me clearly in University, before the Masai, before I had any idea what the grasping was. I was at a familiar picnic table in the country yard of my favorite professor, Jerry, an eccentric free spirited beer-drinking mathematician who never offended a woman while frequently breaking into odd bawdy songs, and inspired extreme devotion and appreciation of mathematical beauty among his students.
We were again at his house for gluttonous and exquisite barbeque and conversations that explored all subjects with the aid of equations. I suddenly remembered in the middle of the conversation that I had a pet with me, and told the group I hoped it was ok. The perspective of the dream went to an aerial view, and there was an ominous and lifelike lizard ten times the size of Jerry’s house sitting behind us in a field, still and silent. I awoke with deep dread but no explicit knowledge of what it meant.
The lizard was the dream body of my youthful ambition to save the world from whatever was wrong with it, the crushing egoic enormity of this mission I was on. The giant grasping an end to The Muse that was living in me, my ego, was ready to devour me with a dream of saving.
This lizard followed me around in years spent in Africa in the aid industry, causing several massive anxiety attacks a day, and started shrinking about 10 years later. I had the powerful feeling that I was drowning during seminars on a PhD in Psychology where I was studying the basis of the economic ideology that I found puzzling, and had to pull over a car five times on a 4 hour car ride to deal with attacks. I soon understood during my first meditation retreat that my life had become trapped in a metaphor for struggle, my hunched back had been made into a means of reminding me that I had a mission to slog, and win against the great vague terror, and grasp greatness. I could not sit up for more than 15 minutes without pain. It took more time to both see the reality of the grasping and not try to be individually responsible for “doing something about it.” Of course this complex is alive in me, though more subtly, as I organize retreats for contemplative activists.
The Grasping hides in similar subtle ways in those that sense The Grasping and decide to fight it. If I grasp for freedom it easily can turn into slavery to the morally charged idea rebellion. In many activists, I see kindred spirits who end up determined to make progress by marching false progress. Most of us have the good sense not to use the word progress, but on some level, the idea is still animating us. In proportion to the terror of The Grasping there is glory in being one who grabs it, and makes it go away. And such glory can be The Grasping’s control of us. WE can deny it, but it is there when we watch the Matrix and feel a rush of excitement for Neo’s fantastical exercise of his powers. The opposite of uncontrolled grasping is letting go and experiencing mystery, true mysticism, however mystic wisdom is an invitation back to “the vanity of vanities.” Yesterday’s revelation becomes today’s ego trip, so the means of healing our grasping infection can become a means of providing our infection with food. Because saving is another form of grasping. As can happen for the artist, the activist’s intellect can easily grasp the beauty of the whole human creature that it is part of and make out of that beauty an idea of itself — the self-concept (ego) — and use that idea as means of indulging in the pleasure ‘more absurd and grotesque vanities’12 than are found in “normal” life. If contemplative activism gets any attention, vanity will sound its siren-call louder. We must as Jiddu Krishnamurti advised truly see the order in our disorder, let us of this intricacy in and accept its dynamics.
This is perhaps why, as Thich Nhat Hanh said, the next enlightened being may be Sangha (community.) He realized that the unwholesome habit-patterns of our time — The Grasping — is too much for an individual to remain aware of and to resist by themselves. Probably it is only together that we can resist The Grasping’s deep and subtle hold, and only then if we can talk with total honesty about seeing it in each other. I think such a movement must start with really seeing the elephant, if we are to address it with serious collective practice. We will only know how to respond to this beast after sensing it. So I end my reflections and will listen for more voices in the dark.
As we slouch towards collapse that could leave the earth to the humble, the folly of their ignorance is less clear to us, and they have heard why there is no snow on the mountains and are less impressed.
An aside may be necessary ─ to be free from The Grasping is not to be an angel or a “noble savage”. With the idea of Noble savages The Grasped have made an unattainable ideal image out of available sublime beauty, ensuring that they remain unfamiliar with it. That is, Masai are not noble savages, but people who are quite in touch with the same availability of beauty that many observers think Westerners are alienated from. The sublime is available, but quite foreign to The Grasped. Having familiarity with Life Itself does not make you Christ-like, it is not “the force of good” or any other bit of weird superstition. The idea of the noble savage seems basically an exercise in confusing presence and “the force of good.”
Philosopher Timothy Morton has introduced the term hyperobject for things that can be understood by analogy with this proverbial elephant. I avoid this term because The Grasping is as much a subject as an object. A hyper-subject might be appropriate, but the term superorganism already exists.
Forbes, J. D. (2011). Columbus and other cannibals: The Wetiko disease of exploitation, imperialism, and terrorism. Seven Stories Press.
Notice the difficulties of language here. Grasping entails physical contact (connection) but also emotional disconnection (as Macy says) ─ like when we try to control another person. No
See Ginsburg’s Howl https://poets.org/poem/howl-parts-i-ii
By Mystical I mean knowing that is not conceptual, a keen intuition heightened by contemplation.
The Terrible muse has been connected by Jack Forbes , Levy and Alnoor Ladha to the Native American word “Wetiko” at length, please read them
See How the Peace Drum Came to the People in Tamarack Song’s book: Whispers of the Ancients: Native Tales for Teaching and Healing in Our Time
See the Handsome family’s sone “The Bottomless hole”
In many cultures, of course wild dancing is done in the middle of town centres, or busy thoroughfares in the middle of major public holidays.
This phrasing is a quote of Jiddu Krishnamurti in dialogue with Chogyam Rinpoche. In this case, Krishnamurti asked if the evangelical offering of meditation to Westerners was not also source of profound delusion.