What exactly is grasping?

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Wet Paint, modified 14 Years ago at 6/8/09 8:52 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/8/09 8:52 PM

What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 22924 Join Date: 8/6/09 Recent Posts
Author: SoManyThoughts
Forum: Dharma Overground Discussion Forum

I was reading one of Shinzen Young's articles on coping with pain, and he talks about pain, pleasure, grasping, and aversion. He makes the point that they're separate (i.e. you can have pleasure without grasping, and pain without aversion). So as I understand it, grasping is something you add to pleasant or desirable sensation, and aversion is something you add to unpleasant ones, and it's good to learn to see the difference.

I realized I don't really know how to recognize grasping. In my practice lately I'm noticing the qualities of thoughts. It's easy to notice pleasant/unpleasant or solid/filmy and all kinds of weird textures or flavors they seem to have. I think I "get" aversion-- it's that sense of wanting to get rid of the experience, right? And that sense of wanting to get rid of it can be separated from the original unpleasant sensation.

I can notice pleasant sensations and energy, but I can't identify grasping. The one aspect of experience I think might be grasping is wanting to wallow in fantasy, or wanting to will an experience into having a positive outcome (as I define it). But that definition seems too macroscopic. I suspect that grasping is an identifiable flavor of thoughts & reactions to sensations that I'm not yet separating out from the quality of pleasantness.

Can anyone shed any light on how grasping feels different than pleasurable thoughts/sensations?
Nigel Sidley Thompson, modified 14 Years ago at 6/8/09 10:05 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/8/09 10:05 PM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 14 Join Date: 8/26/09 Recent Posts
You can think of them (grasping and aversion) as expressions of desire. Grasping is a vector, it has direction. There is distance between you and an object imagined to be pleasurable, and there's a move to close that distance. Alternately, you can sense that there will soon be distance (in time, space, or both) between you and a current pleasure. You grasp to try to prevent the distance from occurring. Introduce the sensations related to time and/or space and it's clearer.

Grasping carries feelings of longing, fear, desperation, excitement, focus, and active intentionality.

One common example of grasping in practice: you experienced a subjectively enjoyable, pleasurable meditative state, and now you want to have it again (or you want it to stay and not go).

Grasping is movement towards.

Grasping and aversion are both impulses. They're both intentions to move (one's awareness). Or to have something else move (into or out of the space of awareness).

From a physical, sensate perspective, observe tension, tightness, resistance. Not relaxation and opening.
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Wet Paint, modified 14 Years ago at 6/8/09 10:35 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/8/09 10:35 PM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 22924 Join Date: 8/6/09 Recent Posts
Author: SoManyThoughts

Hey thanks, that really gives me a clear sense of what to look for. It looks like grasping shares several qualities with aversion-- fear, desperation, and wanting things to be other than they are.
Nigel Sidley Thompson, modified 14 Years ago at 6/8/09 10:52 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/8/09 10:52 PM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 14 Join Date: 8/26/09 Recent Posts
of course, this mainly means that I'm familiar with grasping and aversion. ;-)

then again, I suppose we all are.
beta wave, modified 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 1:43 AM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 1:43 AM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 5 Join Date: 8/30/09 Recent Posts
Another form of grasping is believing something to be further reaching than it is. For example, pain right now means only that. It doesn't mean pain in the future, or something is fundamentally wrong or needs fixing -- or that even the pain right now is the whole story of the moment. Grasping can cause one element of experience to overshadow others.

Hope that helps!
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Jackson Wilshire, modified 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 3:03 AM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 3:03 AM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 443 Join Date: 5/6/09 Recent Posts
This is a wonderful question, SoManyThoughts.

In my experience, grasping and aversion are two sides of the same coin. This shows up most clearly for me during the dukkha nanas (dark night), where I will simultaneously be grasping for the next stage and pushing aware the current one (as if such a thing were actually possible).

During meditation, and while being aware of any flavor of experience, it can be helpful to ask these three questions:

Will grasping this (holding it tightly) relieve my suffering?
Will pushing this away relieve my suffering?
Will completely ignoring this (or insisting, consciously or unconsciously, that it isn't there) relieve my suffering?

As you might guess, the answer to all three is a big fat No! This helps to frame your original question is a different context. From this standpoint, it is more clear what is meant by grasping, aversion, and delusion.

Practice well,
Jackson
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Wet Paint, modified 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 3:13 AM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 3:13 AM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 22924 Join Date: 8/6/09 Recent Posts
Author: bboyYen

Grasping would be the equivalent of wanting something.

For example if you feel a pleasant sensation, and you like it and want it, you don't want it to go away then that's grasping.

But if you just feel a pleasant sensation and watch it with awareness or equanimity or whatever, not wanting it to go away, but not grasping for it either.

Then that's just a pleasant sensation.

You might even go so far as to say sensations induce grasping, which is what they say in dependent origination.

Aversion is not liking an object or not wanting it, or wanting it to go away, so when you experience an unpleasant feeling and want it to go away and hate it et.c

Then that's aversion.

But the actual feeling and the emotion are different.

If you view the pleasant feelings with equanimity or awareness or whatever, without hating it or liking it or wanting to keep it or wanting it to go away then that's just the feeling there but you have equanimity.
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Wet Paint, modified 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 11:47 AM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 11:47 AM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 22924 Join Date: 8/6/09 Recent Posts
Author: msj123

SoManyThoughts,

I think you have a good grasp already! Further investigation will clarify the difference between the bare sensation (form) and the craving/aversion aspect (feeling). The clue is the "feeling tone" that immediately follows the bare sensation.
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Wet Paint, modified 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 3:42 PM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/9/09 3:42 PM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 22924 Join Date: 8/6/09 Recent Posts
Author: okir

Nigel said that (among other other good points he raised) grasping is "movement towards." I also experience it as a feeling of want combined with a feeling of lack, or need. Most easily identified if, say, someone you feel you desire breaks your heart, or if you feel a lack from not having that piece of chocolate that you don't really need.

But you can experience it in more subtle ways, too. For example, in meditation, I have noticed the grasping as a subtle feeling of "stickiness" around my conception of self. It's sort of like there's a feeling of lack around that sense of self, so I constantly have to grasp at ideas of self in order to hold it together. Whenever thoughts of my self arise, and I am, eh, fixated on (stuck to!), some idea of self, it feels like stickiness or need to exert a magnetic force towards that idea of self. That sounds really weird now that I'm writing it, but, oh well!
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Wet Paint, modified 14 Years ago at 6/10/09 6:45 AM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/10/09 6:45 AM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 22924 Join Date: 8/6/09 Recent Posts
Author: SoManyThoughts

Thanks for all the tips. There's so much grasping going on in my mind, no wonder I couldn't identify it as a unique aspect. I'm like the fish that doesn't notice the water :-)
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Jackson Wilshire, modified 14 Years ago at 6/10/09 7:09 AM
Created 14 Years ago at 6/10/09 7:09 AM

RE: What exactly is grasping?

Posts: 443 Join Date: 5/6/09 Recent Posts
You and me both! ;-)