The Little Book of Life and Death by Douglas Harding

Author:Douglas Harding [Harding, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780955451218
Barnesnoble:
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

Synthesis

As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveller on this dark earth.

Goethe

Is that long and hard ascent, with all its many tracks and routings East and West, now outdated – rather as long journeys on foot or horseback have been outdated by fast cars and jet planes? Was all that dedication and patient spiritual endeavour, that toil, those tears, that dashing and recovery of hopes – was it all an aberration and waste of energy, a malaise we’ve almost recovered from?

Of course not. Quite the contrary!

While it remains true that this jump-jet way, this instant seeing into my Timeless Nature, is effortless and free, it’s also true that it works out in my life only to the extent that it’s worked at. The discovery that I am absolutely all right as I am – as I AM – has to be actualized by its patient rediscovery, and rediscovery, and rediscovery, till all traces of artifice and effort, all sense of attainment, have vanished. Till it has become in ordinary day-to-day living what it always was in fact, one’s natural state. In other words, sudden vertical take-offs notwithstanding, one has also to take that slow and arduous and gradual road. Though progress along that road is made by repeatedly getting off it, one can’t stay airborne. (One is up and away, and earth-bound, and there’s no contradiction. Thus Zen Master Ummon: ‘For the truly enlightened man subjection to the law of cause and effect, and freedom from it, are one truth.’) There is no trouble-free or painless way. The quality of one’s spiritual life depends on the effort one’s prepared to put into it.

On the other hand, no one who sees into his or her Deathless Nature should be daunted by this prospect of ‘hard work’ lasting perhaps many years. One’s very first brief and tentative seeing of This (in so far as we can speak of a first) is already perfect seeing. One doesn’t see more clearly, ever, as time goes by. This is the one thing I just can’t do badly or partially. A lifetime, a hundred lifetimes of practice won’t get me an inch nearer to WHAT I AM; they can only bring it more and more to my attention.

And (I ask myself) is this seeing life such a hard life? Yes, and emphatically No! According to my long-time observation of myself, the non-seeing life proves far, far harder. After all, what is this in-seeing but living from the truth of my Nature: and what is this wilful blindness to my Nature but living from a lie (which – to the extent that it can be done and not just imagined – has to be damnably inefficient)? When I use a tool it’s as well to notice whether it’s a hammer or a saw, unless I’m determined to injure myself and botch the job: well, I’m my own tool for living, so I take a good look at it, and make sure I go on looking.

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