the place of death

It’s All Grasping

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Lately I’ve been contemplating several psychological phenomena I see in my meditations and self-analysis. The funny thing is the more I look at the different problems we face – and that we address with meditation, psychology, and spiritual pursuits, it all seems a whole lot alike. In a way that seems very familiar. It’s all grasping.

I have talked before of what I call The Escape Capsule, that place in our heads and minds where “we” hide. Where we run away from things. Where we think we’ll be safe, but we are not safe, and our “we” is ephemeral.

I’ve talked of the Place of Death from the Tao Te Ching, where we hide, where we cut ourselves off from life, and where we usually seal our fate by being so disconnected. We can’t move through the world and flow with it, we can’t respond, and we fail. I noted it was a lot like The Escape Capsule, if not the same.

In contemplating Desire, I’ve seen how I have habits of mentally grabbing or seeking certain things. I’ll latch onto something, some urge or thought, and my mind is engaged in everything from rumination to playing with mental puzzles. In fact, my mind seems to want to have something to grab onto – I imagine you’ve been there as well.

All three of these things I’ve analyzed over time- and named, are reflections of one simple thing – Grasping or Craving. You know, what Buddha warned us about explicitly in his Four Noble Truths, and what everyone else warned us about. Buddha though really brought it to the surface with his gift for specific organization, so game recognizes game.

Needing a separate self, needing to wall it off (in a way that ruins it), and just craving really are the same thing. We’ve got all these grabby complexes in our heads, burrowed into our habits and even our physical postures and tensions, that are active. They also end up backfiring and making us miserable if they solidify too much.

Desire and fear, hiding away and reaching out, it’s all the same, grasping. You can feel that in the tension in your neck, in the worry running around your brain, in the obsession that makes you stare at the cigarette or angry email in horror. You’re stuck in the machine, and the machine is what you thought you were – and thought you enjoyed it sometimes.

As we get reminded, craving, what makes us suffer, is the problem. But this is a reminder it has many faces. The desire that torments us, the cutting off we create, the attempts to escape – they’re all the same.

This is where I get thankful for the legion of sages, therapists, mystics, artists, writers, and so on that keep reminding us that being alive isn’t the same as grasping, or having, or running away from danger. It’s being alive, flowing like water, present, there. That’s what meditation and therapy and so on are about in the end – seeing, understanding, but most importantly being there and being real in the midst of it all.

It’s all been said before, but I’m glad people keep saying it.

– Xenofact

The Place Of Death

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In The Tao Te Ching, Chapter 50, there’s a line about people who’ve attained the Tao that translates as “they have no place of death to enter,” “they have no place of death in them” or “for them there is no place in the land of death.” I’d not thought much about this chapter or this line until recently until a mix of meditation and stressful events gave me a new understanding.

In analyzing my own fears and concerns, I saw how they would obsess me. I’d worry about things, and thus my fears, from death to petty things, were actually part of me. I’d carry my concerns with me constantly, and as you doubtlessly know that was a heavy burden.

But being isolated, worrying, etc. just cuts me off from myself. It keeps me from engaging with life – with the Tao. It keeps me from being truly alive, freezing me in place. Honestly we all know too well how fears and worries can lock us down and even lead to bad outcomes – sometimes the very ones we feared.

There in my head, is the Place of Death.

Life, I realized, is a dialogue. You’re constantly reacting and interacting with places, people, ideas, food, etc. You make judgements and evaluations, changing or maintaining your course. Being alive, really alive, really there in the Tao, is a conversation.

And you can’t really have a dialogue when you’re hiding away. Life has to be lived, engaged. You can’t freeze yourself in your head or loop with scenarios to “protect” yourself.

Before I had talked about what I call “The Escape Capsule” in psychology and psychoanatomy. We build a walled off part of ourselves, shoving our supposed “self” into a box inside of us to protect it. This produces tension, warps our concept of ourselves, creates physical discomfort, and is quite miserable.

The “Escape Capsule” and “The Place of Death” are close to or are the exact same thing. Trying to get away from a changing world means you carry the changes you fear with you.

Life is a dialogue, really embracing yourself and the universe means you’re engaging. You can’t hide away in that case, you have to be open and vulnerable – because that’s how you have the dialogue with the world. The attempts to escape just lead you to build a mausoleum in your head.

It might be hard, but we can’t run away or stew in our fears. Why have a place for Death in us? Death has its own place in the world. We might as well find our place as well.

-Xenofact