that which can be grasped

That which can be grasped is not real

The nature of reality is change, flux, movement, a flow of energy. Reality is like the wind. It is ungraspable. And there is beauty in that.

The human mind, though, has a want, a wanting to grasp. And that wanting to grasp requires that things are graspable. So living in this mind, this grasping mind, we see things as graspable even when they are not. We grasp at money. We grasp at a job. We grasp at a home. We grasp at a nation. We even grasp at a mobile telephone. It’s rather an impoverished existence, pitiful.

And perhaps the most pitiful aspect of it all is that we grasp at each other. We grasp for love. But love is also like the wind. And grasping, we might catch hold of something but it is no longer the wind, it is no longer love. Thus we are impoverished. And we drag each other evermore into this pitiful state.

And when you come face to face with a living buddha – perhaps yourself in the mirror one day, or perhaps another being – in that moment, of facing a buddha, you will not be able to grasp anything. For a buddha is simply one who is living in the ungraspable, as the ungraspable; no longer living in concepts but in reality; no longer being driven by wants, the way one wants life to be, but instead simply residing in truth, the way things are.

It is ironic is it not that the things we are really grasping for are nothing more than our ideas of the way things should be; ideas, the most intangible aspect of our day to day existence. It is those we are trying to make concrete. It is those we are grasping for. And the outer, physical world that seems so real to us, that is not what we are really grasping at. For that is the world of change.

Even a mountain is as the wind – passing through, in a state of flux, ever changing, here today and tomorrow gone, having returned once more to spaciousness and silence and the stillness of eternity. So even a mountain cannot be grasped. The only things that we can grasp are the ideas, the notions in our own mind. The idea of the mountain, that we can grasp at. But when we do so, we are no longer seeing the mountain, we are no longer living in truth. We have become lost to our own little world of ideas. So step out of that little world. See the mountain in the moment, in all its glory. But don’t reach to grasp it. Exchange a smile and walk on by. For there are yet more treasures beyond that mountain.