Clingers and Hoarders I Have Known

Sadhguru of the Isha Foundation recommends a simple exercise for wellbeing called Isha Kriya. We can all do it, but it’s a great solution for clingers and hoarders as well – people who are blindly identified with their possessions. 

This exercise is a big revolution – or a terrifying revelation if you haven’t pondered on this before. Within the complete exercise there are various stages, but stage 1 is that on the in-breath you repeat to yourself “I am not the body” and on the out-breath – it gets even worse –: “I am not even the mind”. Poor materialists! They are left in the lurch here. Will their personalities or even their humanity be taken away from them if they do this? If they’re not the body or the mind, what’s left?

There’s a lot left, the whole universe in fact, and it’s infinite, so don’t worry. Animals are stuck in their patterns, humans are supposed to be able to grow and move upwards…

Let me just mention two cases of clinging and hoarding. One is a little old lady who, it is said, grew up in the war years (WW2) and is thereby supposedly justified for keeping all her things, however big, small, useful or potentially useful or useless, or because they came from this person or that, and although she normally knows where these things are, she really does have quite a quaint little house all full of objects, tools, heirlooms, papers, clutter, even stacks of scratch paper and Shredded Wheat cards, and of course lots of dirt, grime and filth.

The second example is an elderly gentleman who as a boy collected vinyl records, left them at his mother’s home 45 years ago, went back to visit only once for a few days in all those years, and has never bothered about the records since, but when they were recently cleaned out of the attic and sold to a collector, and he was told about it, he protested effusively from another continent that no one should have interfered with his affairs!

Now compulsive hoarders always have a justification for keeping all those things others “mistakenly” call unneeded. They are very adroit at explaining why such-and-such an object is of great value to them. See the "Batman" parody, below. And egoistic, uncaring persons who cling to things only when they’re gone are also very good at berating others for their insensitivity. But they are not so strange. The fact is that attachment and identification affect all of us – it’s just the degree and the object of attachment that are different.

What we are most attached to is of course our body. Body-love is drummed into us from all sides from the moment our little baby tummies are tickled by kind-hearted relatives. Some people possibly develop body-loathing by themselves later on. Yes, we have to learn how to use the body. Sure, we need to learn motor skills. But when there is no antidote to constant body-identification, we grow up firmly ensconced in our little shells and think that the body is all there is, and, for some reason, it has to be kept young as well when age creeps in. Some people actually progress a little further to think it’s their minds that make them who they are. And reeling its head over both these domains is the grandiose Ego who also thinks he’s the biggest of bosses, and woe unto him who offends that entity, because it will rear its ugly head and smite all and sundry and pummel them down into the dust.

So it’s quite easy to progress from the love of or identification with the physical body, and our attachment to our minds, and extend our boundaries to include our things, our possessions, our little souvenirs of life that no one knows what to do with when we die – unless the chain of identification continues in offspring or relatives. Of course no one would spurn a nice inheritance – especially cash, land and buildings – but what about those old letters, postcards, photos, mementoes and papers that meant so much to one person but fail to attract any interest from descendents?

So, yes, those familiar with Thoreau will side with his “Simplify, simplify”, but it really means that we have to look at things from a new viewpoint.

Growing means accepting life as it is. As life goes on, we should become wiser and wealthier in understanding, not necessarily in possessions. When we die, we leave everything behind – body, mind and possessions. So why live life clinging onto these and hoarding them? What possible good does it do to “us”? Because behind the body, and behind the mind is the “I” that is the Observer, the Consciousness, the small-scale representative of the Creator. That is what we need to promote and nourish and care for, not dust and ashes, not sense perceptions falling onto the field of awareness and being reacted to, not things made of clay, stone, wood, paper and man-made composites, however needed or useful they may be during our lifetime.

Celebrate your Self-Awareness and thank heavens you are not just your body, or your mind. But much more than that if you really want to be.