Nothing to Grasp

New edition now available

Nothing to Grasp is my essential message distilled to its simplest and clearest form—

Originally published in 2012, the book has just been re-published by New Sarum Press in new paperback and kindle editions.

The paperback will once again be affordably priced at only $12.95. (The last publisher had the price up over $30.)

The text is the same, but it has gorgeous new front and back covers, and the text is in a different font, so it’s a few pages longer than it was, but still under 200 pages.

I describe the book in the preface as follows:

This book is about liberation. That doesn’t mean the end of earthquakes, wars, bankruptcies, unemployment and cancer, and it doesn’t mean a life without heartbreak, depression, anxiety or addiction. It’s about recognizing that this is the Holy Reality, and that the Holy Reality is not somewhere else. It’s the realization that the fundamental problem can only be resolved now, and that actually, there is nothing to resolve. Liberation is finding freedom in limitation and perfection in imperfection. It is the freedom to be exactly as we are. But what are we? What is real Here / Now? What is life all about? Who is reading these words? Is reading these words an individual choice, or is it the only possible activity of the whole universe at this moment, and is there a difference? Is there a practice that leads to liberation, or does that very idea reinforce the illusion that there is someone who is bound and that liberation is “out there” somewhere in the future? This book explores these questions.

It doesn’t aim to provide answers, but rather, to undermine the assumptions behind the questions, to expose the imaginary nature of our apparent problems and dilemmas. This book invites an open listening and looking. It is not about acquiring new beliefs, but rather, it is an invitation to discover what requires no believing in order to be.

Here’s a sample chapter, after which you’ll find links to where you can purchase the book and get more information:

What Is This?

(a chapter from Nothing to Grasp)

Take a moment to stop reading and to simply appreciate the happening of this moment. Be fully present to the sounds, fragrances, aromas, visual images, somatic sensations – not these labels, but the happening itself, this undeniable and utterly immediate present experiencing. What is this?

The thinking mind instantly wants to supply an answer. It wants to figure this out – label everything, categorize it, explain it, understand it, analyze it, capture it, frame it, get control of it. This is the function of the thinking mind, and it serves us well in certain basic survival situations such as food-gathering, shelter-building, or navigating our way through new terrain. It has gotten us to the moon and to the top of the food chain. Our conceptual maps are functionally necessary and not to be discarded, but no matter how accurate the map is, it is never the territory itself. And yet, we have a deeply-conditioned tendency to mistake the map for the territory. We do this without even realizing we are doing it.

Some of our most commonplace concepts are so ubiquitous and pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that they are actually concepts. “The world,” “the body,” “the mind,” “the self,” “consciousness,” “awareness,” “nonduality” – we throw these word-concepts around without ever stopping to wonder what we are actually talking about. And next thing we know, we’re lost in some conceptual confusion, very much akin to wondering what will happen to me if I step off the edge of the flat earth. That’s an imaginary problem, as all of us in the 21^st century realize, but for people in earlier centuries, it seemed quite real. And our own conceptual conundrums seem equally real to us. “Will I still be here after I die?” or “Am I enlightened yet?” or “Do I have free will?” can seem like perfectly sensible questions, but they are every bit as absurd as wondering what will happen to me when I step off the edge of the earth.

Thought divides the world up into pieces and then tries to figure out which comes first, the chicken or the egg (the brain or consciousness, mind or matter), as if this problem actually makes sense, as if the “things” we are trying to reconcile actually exist. Conceptual thought serves us well as long as we don't forget that the conceptual pictures it generates are at best only relatively true, but never absolutely true. For example, "The earth is a planet orbiting the sun." This is a relative truth. It is functionally useful. We’re certainly not going to deny it. But in the absolute sense, there is no such thing as an "earth" or a "sun," for these are conceptual abstractions of what is actually ever-changing, inconceivable, undivided, unknowable, seamless flux, a fleeting appearance in consciousness.

When we try to figure out “the meaning of life” or “the nature of reality,” or when we try to come up with a conceptual understanding of Consciousness, Totality, God, or the Ground of Being, we inevitably end up frustrated and confused. Any conceptual picture of reality is always subject to doubt, and no metaphysical formulation ever satisfies our deep longing for Truth.

What satisfies that deep longing of the heart is the falling away of the attempt to make sense of everything. Of course, that doesn't mean we don't still make relative sense of things in a functional way in daily life. But we stop trying to take hold of Totality, or grasp the Ground of Being, or figure out the meaning of life. Instead, we relax into simply being life. We learn to recognize (to see, to sense) when we're beginning to grasp or fixate, and in that recognition, quite naturally there is an ability to relax and let go. When we stop trying to figure it all out, we discover that it doesn't need to be figured out, and in fact, can’t be figured out! When we stop desperately trying to get a grip, we find nothing is lacking and there is nothing to grasp.

When we wake up to simply being Here / Now, all our confusion and problems vanish into thin air. Of course, we may still have a flat tire or a terminal cancer, but it is no longer a problem. There is nothing confusing about it. Our neurotic habits, our so-called character defects, our apparent imperfections, mistakes and failings – all of this is realized to be simply the weather of life, and it is no more personal or meaningful than a cloudy day. It is a passing appearance, and in the next moment, it all changes.

Thought and language are wonderful tools. But words are inherently abstract and representational. Even when they are trying not to, they inevitably tend to freeze and divide the seamless fluidity of life, creating the mirage-like conceptual appearance of separate, independent forms that persist through time. So whenever we try to think about life, we tend to get easily confused. We get confused because we are thinking about and trying to reconcile “things” that don’t actually exist. Whatever verbal formulation we use to describe reality is never quite right. Thought can never get hold of the actuality of this-here-now. Reality itself is too fluid, too immediate, too dynamic to be divided up and caught in the conceptual net of words.

If we say, “This is it,” the words create the very split they attempt to point beyond. If we say “All is One,” it is one too many. If we call it “nothing,” it seems to deny the undeniable presence of everything. If we assert that “there is nothing to do,” it seems to overlook the necessity of doing whatever we are moved by life to do. If we assert that “there is something to do,” it makes it sound as if something else is required in order to be what we already are.

The dualistic mind grasps, reifies, asserts, denies and fixates. It takes positions and clings to those positions, mistaking them for reality. It identifies with its positions and feels threatened when they are questioned. But to cling to any conceptual map of reality is to miss the ever-changing actuality of this-here-now.

That doesn’t mean we can’t still use words. Words can be helpful pointers, but if we think that “Here / Now” or “Awareness” or “emptiness” or “the Self” or “the Tao” or “Buddha Nature” or “Oneness” or “Unicity” is some relative “thing” that we can grasp, then we have made the absolute into just another illusory object. But what these words all point to is not something. It is the no-thing-ness (the emptiness, the seamlessness, the boundlessness, the unformed nature) of everything. Emptiness (or unicity) cannot be perceived as an object in the way that we can perceive a mirror, a movie screen or an ocean, which is why these analogies all fall short at a certain point. On the other hand, paradoxically, there is nothing we can see and nowhere we can look that is not emptiness.

When we stop trying to grasp or control our present experience in any way, when we are completely willing for it to be exactly as it is, then something shifts.

The illusory bubble pops. We see that Here / Now is always unobstructed, boundless and open. It is open enough to include even resistance and contraction. Contraction is simply another form that formlessness is momentarily assuming, another fleeting appearance with no inherent reality. Nothing needs to be different from how it is. We don’t need to define or explain this present happening, and in fact, we can’t!

The only real answer to “What is this?” is to be awake and see.

— from Nothing to Grasp

Learn more and read a different excerpt at New Sarum Press.
Learn more about the book at my website here.

Available in paperback from Amazon USA
And as a Kindle here.

To find the book on Amazon in different countries just use /dp/ and the numbers above after the country address, for example:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1738529657 or https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F7HVVP53

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Love to all…