More on the nature of the Light

It occurs to me that those who meditate on the uncreated Tao that cannot be spoken, and those who innocently venerate a saint, are both seeing the same Light. For the Heavenly Light is alive; it is neither reflected nor refracted in compatible souls, but rather lives and dwells in them, and shines forth from them again with the same freshness as when it first shone into creation.

How many of us would have thought of God on our own, and how well would we have known the Holy One without the Holy Ones? It does happen that the Light breaks into a soul directly from beyond, I believe. But more often it jumps from soul to soul, shifting colors with them, yet remaining the same Light. A disciple is not above his master even if the disciple does greater works. If we disregard one of the least in the Kingdom of Heaven, we may deprive ourselves of a great Light that should have lived and grown in us until it reached the brightness of full day. Sometimes it is just a few words from an unassuming soul, and yet those words carry with them a spirit that sets all things right and becomes a wellspring of life, long after they are forgotten by the one who spoke them.

Humility

This is an important topic, but not one taught in most schools (except the school of life, where there are daily lessons). Christians in particular should be desperately interested in understanding humility, for the Bible says: "God resists the proud, but gives grace unto the humble" (James 4). And nothing worthwhile in a Christian's life is accomplished without grace, not even the basic salvation. If God resists us, it won't be easy to get into the Kingdom of Heaven, whatever that means to each of us.

My current best approximation is that humility is personal realism. Obviously this is different from from the notion that humility is simply low self-esteem. True, for much of our lives this is a good rule of thumb, because we hold ourselves in too high regard (at least in some ways). But gradually the balance shifts. Jesus could say "I am meek and humble in heart" (Matthew 11). It may sound like he is boasting of his humility, a paradox. But he was just telling the truth. We tend to start out proud but not knowing it. Then we are proud but realize it. Eventually we may become humble but are still not humble enough to bear knowing it. To be able to know for sure that we are humble ... Ah, that's something.

Everything is relative except the absolute. So one way to gain humility points is to compare ourselves to people who have accomplished more than we, or those who have accomplished much despite great difficulties. In the middle ages, people studied hagiology, the science of saints. Today we study criminology, even common folks do that just by reading the papers. No wonder people get uppity.

Life is the first draft of our autobiography

Today I got mail: Amazon.com recommends "Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography" by Huston Smith.

That certainly sounds fascinating. In my life it has been the Divine chasing me, strangely enough.

It must be awesome to be able to, around the age of 90, write an autobiography called "Tales of Wonder". I suspect that if I reach that age and write my autobiography, it will be called "The Eternal Newbie."

Words of wisdom, and not by me!

"As long as you study the Truth at only an intellectual level, there is a ceiling, but once you reach the stage of applying this knowledge in a practical way, all limits disappear and your learning will take an infinite variety of forms."

-Ryuoho Okawa: Ten Principles of Universal Wisdom.

The benefit of matter

I don't have much to say about the spirit world.  I have no memories of a life before life, nor have I visited the afterlife, and for this I am rather thankful. So I don't know whether people can be conscious without a body, or in just an ethereal body.  But the spirit world is certainly present even in this life. That's something I know, as it is plain to see. It is not like we exist in a purely material world now!  Rather, we could think of the present world as "spirit world plus inertia".  If we imagine being alive in the spirit world alone, then our mind would immediately manifest its contents.  Kind of like a dream, really.  What we believed would appear before us. But thanks to the dense, slow matter, in this world we move only slowly and with considerable use of energy toward what is in our heart.  But move we do.

You could also say that our spirit part is destiny, and our material part is fate.  Life in this world is fate and destiny.  But if we were only in the spirit world, only our destiny would manifest, for better or for worse.  Much better or much worse, depending on our choices.  (It is believed that angels are in this situation:  Either glory or utter desecration, depending on what they decided once and for all. But we, we are held back, moving only gradually. This viscous quality of earthly life is very handy when we are falling, as we kind of sink downward instead of plummeting to the bottom of Hell at the speed of light. Of course, we are equally held back if ascending.)

Absent spirit, fate would reign supreme, and we would be like animals, blown about by whatever came our way, with no aspiration. Or drifting with the current. Conversely, without fate we would just boundlessly create our own world.  There are some "New Age" people who believe they live in such a world, where everyone can get the green light in every crossing at the same time. They believe they are God, creating their world. You should not hurry toward such a world, but rather prepare yourself, so that you don't accidentally create your own hell. That is sure to happen if you mistake desire for aspiration.  

On the radius of happiness

One may disagree with Kofuku-no-Kagaku in various things, but in this at least they hit the bullseye:  You can't go off and create Utopia until you have thoroughly marinated in happiness yourself.  Even if you are running over with happiness and your family and workplace sparkle with it, you still face an unimaginably harder task to transform society.  Even a small town would be a challenge literally orders of magnitude greater.

It is a grotesque arrogance when someone who has no true understanding of happiness in their own everyday circumstances, still think they are qualified to change society in fundamental ways in order to increase the happiness of the populace.  Go back to first grade!  Find out what actually causes happiness and misery, find it out from hands-on experience, study your own life and those right around you, and learn. Then you can cautiously start talking. When you inspire joy and trust by simply being present, then you can show others the way.

"Knowing" the truth

The Master famously says: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 

If we seek the truth because we want to be free, however, this will not happen. Or at least not at once, although we are heading in the right direction.  But the truth is not like a doctor we come to with our symptoms, who then fixes us up and we part amicably. Rather, truth is like someone you fall in love with and marry, and live happily (but not always easily) ever after.  We know truth in the Biblical way, so to speak, the way Adam knew Eve. Or, in our case, rather the other way around. Of this is our freedom born, out of our love for truth and its love for us.

Or so the voice in my head says.