"When you don't cover up the world with words and labels," notes Eckhart Tolle, "a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought. A depth returns to your life. Things regain their newness, their freshness. And the greatest miracle is the experiencing of your essential self as prior to any words, thoughts, mental labels and images. For this to happen, you need to disentangle your sense of I, of Beingness, from all the things it has become mixed up with, that is to say identified with."
". . . (T)hinking is only a tiny aspect of the consciousness that we are," Tolle observes, and "thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence."
"Abba Poeman said to Abba Joseph: Tell me how can I become a monk. And he replied: If you want to find rest here or hereafter, say in every occasion, who am I? and do not judge anyone."
One of the most insightful observations in the Bible is found in the Book of James, where it is plainly stated (at James 1:8) that, "A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."
In one pithy sentence, this profound observation diagnoses the basic human dilemma - the duality of the ego and 'who' we actually are - as well as the symptoms of our dilemma, i.e., the instability of our egoically-inspired thoughts, words and actions. A person identified with the ego is, of course, apt to think, say or do just about anything in any circumstance. Thus, Abba Joseph's sage advice is to ask oneself repeatedly, and in whatever circumstances one may find him or herself in, the question, "Who am I?" Are our thoughts, words and actions driven by the all-too-human separate "self" of the ego, or do they emanate from the authentic "Self," i.e., in strictly Christian terms, from "the Kingdom of God within" us? (See Luke 17:21.)
Almost as an afterthought, Abba Joseph also adds the advice: "and do not judge anyone," for he must have known that each of us is liable to find him or herself at any time within the throes and under the dictates of of our smaller "self." This is the heart of Jesus' admonishment: "Judge not, lest ye be judged." And, of course, it is the ego, itself, that renders the harshest judgment, and is metaphorically willing to serve as prosecutor, judge, jailer and executioner. Our greatest challenge is, thus, quite literally, to get over our "selves."
"Only he who has renounced the impassioned thoughts of his inner self, which is the intellect" observed St. Hesychios, "is a true monk. It is easy to be a monk in one's outer self if one wants to be," notes the father of' centering prayer, "but no struggle is required to be a monk in one's inner self."
[Palmer, et. al, "The Philokalia," Vol. 1, pp. 174-175.]
Unlike many Christian ministers who preach the gospel of a salvation aimed at an idyllic rather than a horrific and tortuous afterlife, the Rev. Theodore (Ted) Nottingham, of Indianapolis' Northwood Church, preaches the power of a fierce present-moment spirituality that addresses at a deep psychological level the existential problems that all individuals face in this life. In the attached video, Nottingham addresses the principal psychological problem that we all suffer from, namely the self-centered fear that establishes and maintains the human ego.
"Every one of us has fears," Nottingham observes. "Fears of what people think of us, fears of what is going to happen tomorrow, fears of illness and unemployment. . . . What is this fear that is behind all of our distress, he asks, "this fear that keeps us from living in freedom and joy?"
"When you begin to realize that to live in those fears and anxieties that have tortured us for a lifetime is to live turned towards one's 'self.' You might," he observes, "call fear an exaggerated self-interest."
"There is power available in any situation," Nottingham notes. "We just have to get our head out of that which keeps us in the basement of our 'selves,' in our negativity, in our imaginations. Imagination," he notes, is just thoughts . . . thoughts of what could happen if . . . of what that person is thinking right now about you."
"How many of you," he asks, "have had a whole scenario go through your head about what is going to happen at this meeting, and it was totally different and everything was fine? In the meantime, you have lost so much time, so much energy, so much forgetfulness of God. Learn the discipline of directing your thoughts," he urges, "of choosing not to go with the emotion of fear. Remember what you know, and not just what you feel."
"Remember," he says, "that negative thinking always lies, because it only gives you a little piece of the picture, not the whole picture, (but) just a little edge of it. Some of us," he notes, "get addicted to that . . . (and) enjoy our negative emotions."
"We are not our fear," says Nottingham, "and we have to learn from the Master who walks the way for us. Be willing sometimes to do it (while) afraid," he advises. "You are not your fears!"
"The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Some of those situations may no doubt deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice."
-- Adam Smith --
("The Theory of Moral Sentiments")
Would you really be happy if you won the lottery? What if, instead, you had an horrific accident and were rendered parapalegic? Faced with these two "permanent situations" is it possible that we could really over-rate the difference between these two seemingly diametrically opposed outcomes?
It turns out that we do, according to research by psychiatrist, Dan Gilbert. Surprisingly, one year after an inarguably life-changing event, both lottery winners and parapalegics report the exact same level of happiness with their lives. By virtue of our anatomy alone, Gilbert explains in the attached video, humans have an unbelievable capacity to synthesize happiness. The trouble is, few of us (a) know it, or (b) know how to tap into it.
This is perhaps not so surprising, given that in our consumer society we are taught (incorrectly) that attaining happiness lies in the acquisition of exterior things, and that permanent happiness can be found through such acquisition. Gilbert looks at the the thought processes that goes into acquiring goods and the phenomenon of buyer's remorse in order to demonstrate the innate potential we all have for being either happy - or profoundly unhappy.
"Some things are better than others," Gilbert observes. "We should have perferences that lead us into one future over another."
"But," he cautions, "when those preferences drive us too hard or too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk."
"When our ambition is bounded," he notes, "it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we are prudent, we are caution, we are thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we are reckless and we are cowardly."
"Our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown," Gilbert concludes, "because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity (i.e., happiness) we are constantly chasing when we choose experience."
"Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so . . . "
-- William Shakespeare --
("Hamlet," Act 2, Scene II)
Conscious thought, that great ability of humanity, can be - as Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - "a prison." Lost in our cloying thoughts and judgments, we make a virtual prison out of this world's reality wholly through our thinking. A point recognized in all the world's great wisdom teachings and philosophies.
A more-or-less contemporary accounting of this universal truth was provided by Carl Jung in "The Undiscovered Self," his enlightening look at our conscious and unconscious thinking processes. In it, Jung discusses how the intellect endangers us by wholly obscuring the spiritual instinct that is buried within our very being.
"Nothing," Jung observes, "estranges man more from the ground plan of his instincts than his learning capacity, which turns out to be a genuine drive towards progressive transformations of human modes of behavior. It, more than anything else, is responsible for the altered conditions of our existence and the need for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man's progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious."
"Separation from his instinctual nature," Jung continues, "inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side."
"There is," he notes, "an unconscious psychic reality which demonstrably influences consciousness and its content. All this is known, but no practical conclusions have been drawn from it. . . . We do not think of distrusting our motives or of asking ourselves how the inner man feels about the things we do in the outside world. But actually it is frivolous, superficial and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious."
"We are the origin of all coming evil," warns Jung, in the attached video. And, it is our "thinking without awareness" (as Eckhart Tolle expresses it), our reliance on conscious thought to the utter neglect of our unconscious and its spiritual instincts, which both imprisons and threatens us through a crisis in consciousness. "Nothing is either good or bad," as Hamlet notes, "but our thinking makes it so."
Double, triple or multiple-mindedness is the ordinary state of the vast, vast majority of people. Yet, only a relatively few people - although perhaps that number is growing - even question the state of their consciousness and being in the first place.
In his great book, "How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali," (written with Christopher Isherwood), the Vedantist monk, Swami Prabhavananda observes that if you were to look into the mind of most men or women it would look something like this: "Ink-bottle. That time I saw Roosevelt. In love with the night mysterious. Reds veto Pact. Jimmy's trying to get my job. Mary says I'm fat. big toe hurts. Soup good. . . . etc., etc."
If an individual were to vocalize this barrage of thinking which is the ordinary state of our human, egoic consciousness, we would call him or her mad. Yet this is the ordinary way that most people think. Caught up in the inner dialogue of the ego, they may be compelled to say or do virtually anything; although fear, or perhaps their conscience, usually prevents them from doing so. They are, quite literally, "double-minded" and, hence, "unstable in all their ways," because they are more or less unaware that beneath the raucous thought stream of the ego there is only the clear being of higher consciousness and awareness.
"The truth," says Prabhavananda, "is that we are all inclined to flatter ourselves - despite our daily experience to the contrary - that we spend our time thinking logical, consecutive thoughts. In fact, most of us do no such thing. Consecutive thought about any one problem occupies a very small portion of our waking hours. More usually we are in a state of reverie - a mental fog of disconnected sense-impressions, irrelevant memories, nonsensical scraps of sentences from books and newspapers, little darting fears and resentments, physical sensations of discomfort, excitement or ease."
[Isherwood and Prabhavananda, "How To Know God," pp. 58-59.]
The practice of yoga, like all esoteric religious or spiritual paths, is directed towards stilling the thought-waves of the egoic mind, and, by doing so, realizing the essence of one's being that lies beneath the ego's thought stream. "Who," asked Jesus, "ever added one cubit to his stature by taking thought?" (Matthew 6:27).
Prabhavananda and Isherwood, like other commentators on Patanjali's yoga aphorisms, use the metaphor of a lake to describe the effect of our egoic thinking. The lake is our mind, and when waves of thought muddy that lake, we can no longer see to the lake bottom which is the true essence of our Being. The job of the spiritual aspirant, then, is to still the thought waves in the mind so that he or she can realize their essence. For, at heart, we are all inseparable from the Ground of Being that permeates and sustains the universe, and we are only separate from that Ground of Being to the extent that we allow the reverie of thought to stir the waters.
When we discipline the mind through meditation, prayer and the frequent recurrence to the contemplation of our Being (or the Ground of Being) we become stable. When we don't, we again become "unstable in all our ways."
"There is a way to Reality in and through the soul," writes Aldous Huxley, "and there is a way to Reality in and through the world. Whether the ultimate goal can be reached by following either of these ways to the exclusion of the other is to be doubted. The third, best and hardest way is that which leads to the divine Ground simultaneously in the perceiver and that which is perceived."
"When a man sees one thing separated from another," he is "in mere understanding," Meister Eckhart observed. "And when is a man above mere understanding? That I can tell you: "When a man sees All in all, then a man is above mere understanding.""
[Ibid., p. 57]
These observations, written in 1945 and the early 14th century, respectively, point to a timeless truth, that is very much at the heart of modern spiritual teachings. One of the world's most innovative, authentic and popular spiritual teachers, Eckhart Tolle (who took his name from Meister Eckhart, the great German mystic), speaks to this truth when he talks of the Presence and Being which exists eternally in the present moment of a universal consciousness.
"The problems of the world," Tolle observes in the video, below, "are there because we have lost touched with the Source out of which everything came. So by going into further differentiation, we cannot solve the problems, we actually increase them."
"Connected with the timeless, formless Source of all life within, the space of no thought," he notes, "connected with that, then we can create - not 'we' as individuals, but 'we' as a universal movement of consciousness."
"We need conscious connection with the Source," Tolle concludes. "That is your destiny, that is your life's purpose. That's why we are here. And if it sounds complicated to your mind, it is only to the mind. It is not complicated at all. It's very simple."
But, cautions Huxley: "To find the Kingdom of God exclusively in oneself is easier than to discover it, not only there, but also in the outer world of minds and things and living creatures."
"It is easier," he explains, "because the heights within reveal themselves to those who are ready to exclude from their purview all that lies without. And though this exclusion may be a painful and mortificatory process, the fact remains that it is less arduous than the process of inclusion, by which we come to know the fullness as well as the heights of spiritual life."
"Life is short. And uncertain. It is like a drop of water skittering around on a lotus leaf. You never know when it will drop off the edge and disappear. So each day is far too precious to waste. And each day that you are not radiantly alive and brimming with cheer is a day wasted. "
-- Srikumar Rao --
Fill in the blank: "If ____________, then I would be happy."
I have heard it said that we humans are great logicians, and the mental equation that we are usually preoccupied with is "if x, then y,"
The problem with our great logic, however, is that we spend almost no time looking at the 'x' factor, and concentrate all our imagination on 'y.' "If I had great wealth, then I'd be happy." "If I lost 20 pounds, then I would be attractive." "If I had a great relationship, then I wouldn't want anything else." "If I lose this job, then I'll be homeless." Etc., etc.,etc.
All this mental algebra is just thought-food for the inner mental narrative of our ego sense. So much of our time is spent on how great, or how awful, 'y' would be if 'x' occurs, and little or no time is spent on the reality, probability or possibility of 'x' occurring, a point stressed in a lecture on achieving "happiness" by Professor Srikumar Rao, (attached below).
Is it true that we would experience unending happiness if we just had lots of money in our pocket, weighed twenty pounds less and were in a new relationship? Most people's experience, but not their inner narrative, says that this is just not so.
"It's the model itself that is flawed," says Professor Rao, "not what you put on the 'if' side of the equation."
"The problem," Rao notes, "is that your life right now, with all the problems that you have - or more precisely, all the problems that you think you have - is equally perfect, but you do not accept it. In fact, you are spending all your time striving with might and main to make it different. You are not accepting it. And, when you are not accepting it you are buying into the 'if/then' model - 'if this happens then I will be happy' - and it is the model itself that is flawed."
What is needed, Professor Rao observes, is to "invest in the process, and not in the outcome." Rao, like so many others, preaches the benefit of focusing our attention on what it is that we are doing in the here and now, rather on what may - or, likely, may not - be the outcome.
"As we grow up," he observes, "we lose the ability to invest in the process. We start investing in the outcome. By definition the outcome is outside of our control, (and) if that is where we spend all of our emotional energy, we will get drained as we do so."
In encouraging his audience to focus on the process rather than the outcome - to focus their energy on doing 'x' rather than in obsessing over 'y'- Rao quotes the following introduction that the great John Wooden, the legendary U.C.L.A. basketball coach, would give to each of his teams at the start of their season:
"When it's over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If you did the best that you were capable of, the score doesn't matter. But, I suspect that if you did the best you were capable of you will find the score to your liking."
In a fractured world that is divided and then divided again by ideologies, class culture, religions and race - rich vs. poor, capitalist vs. socialist, 'free world' vs. autocracy and theocracy, religion versus science, believer vs. non-believer etc. - do we have have the wherewithal to face the many existential crises we do?
If we do, will that spark the global cohesiveness necessary to face and overcome the global threats - from global warming to overpopulation, and from dire poverty and widespread hunger to massive species extinction - that we face?
If so, one can be certain that it will require a deeper understanding of our collective well-being and an awakening of our collective conscience and consciousness. Thankfully, there are signs that, at least for some small portion of humanity, such an awakening - an awakening of consciousness itself - is already underway.
"We as human beings are at a transitional stage," observes spiritual teacher and best-selling author, Eckhart Tolle, "where we are becoming strongly aware of the pull back to the source."
Yet while one part of humanity realizes that we face what another enlightened spiritual teacher identified as a "crisis in consciousness" - and that being (for the main part) restricted to a small portion of the most highly privileged, best educated and materially wealthy generations the world has ever produced - the large remainder of humanity, or at least its leadership, seems to remain committed to yet more of the thought structures, discussions, politicking and committee meetings that have marked our 'progress' towards the numerous conflicts and crises we now face.
For Tolle, and other progressive voices, it is clear that it is the fabric of our collective consciousness that must be challenged if we are to move forward and address the existential problems that are the results of our old thought structures and paradigmatic thinking.
Are they optimistic and realistic in predicting a widespread awakening of collective consciousness that will lead us back from the brink? Or, is this merely an updated brand of naive millenial faux spirituality? One hopes for the former and dares not look too hard at the latter.
As Einstein once famously remarked, "We can't solve problems by using the same level of thinking we used when we created them."
Spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle,
author of "The Power of Now" and
"The New Earth: Awakening to Your
Life's Purpose."
"(A) fundamental thing that first of all you need to realize," says enlightened spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, "is that life is 'now' and never not 'now.'" It's only this moment ever. Past and future only have a secondary reality. The past only exists if you remember it now. The future only exists if you mentally project yourself into some future moment; but, even that, you can only do 'now.'"
"Your entire life unfolds in this space of 'now,'" says the best-selling author, in the third of a three-part interview. "You cannot think, feel (or) experience anything that is not 'now.'"
However, "(p)eople don't live like that," he observes. "They live as if past and future - especially future for many people - were more important than the present moment. And they have a strange relationship with the present moment, which means with life. For many people," he notes, "the present moment is regarded unconsciously as an obstacle, because they are 'here' but they want to get 'there.'"
"That's a dysfunction," Tolle observes, "making the present moment into an 'obstacle.' Or, even worse, making the present moment into an 'enemy.'"
"It is the one basic spiritual truth," Tolle says. "That one basic spiritual truth expresses itself in different forms in the different religions. So, I'm going to the basic spiritual truth, instead of taking things from different religions and mixing them up."
"The different religions," he notes, "are just expressions of the one basic spiritual truth. So I'm going to the source of that, and express(ing) it in a way that people can understand and realize in their own lives without having to subscribe mentally to this or that religion."
"Whether they are Christians or Buddhists, or whether they subscribe to Islam, or any other belief, it doesn't matter," says Tolle, "the basic truth is there if you look deep enough in all the religions. So it is (a matter of) finding the core of spirituality that is there at the core of all religions."
"We go to the core of religion," he concludes, "rather than treating religion as an ideology, which it often becomes."
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
(See the first and second parts of Tolle's three-part interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company's Sandra Abrams, here and here, respectively.)
Sri Bhagavan, Co-founder (with
Sri Amma) of Oneness University
In the attached video, Sri Bhagavan, a modern teacher of non-dualistic enlightenment who follows in the living Vedantist tradition of Ramana Maharhi and Sri Nisagardatta, explores what enlightenment (or mukhti) is, and what the mental barriers to such enlightenment are. "The general definition which I give of mukhti (enlightenment)," says Sri Bhagavan, "is the liberation of the senses."
"When you see," this modern sage explains, "you do not see without the interference of the mind. If you can see without the mind interfering that is enlightenment. If you can hear without the mind interfering that is enlightenment. The same applies to smell, touch and even thought."
"Thought (can) also be observed without your getting involved with the thought," Sri Bhagavan notes. "What happens is when you are thinking, you think you are thinking. But it is actually possible to see thoughts flow as though they are independent of you"
"This is a physical reality," he explains. "Actually you can see thoughts. Any kind of thought can be coming into you and flowing out of you, and you can watch them. This is the state of (enlightenment); that is, the complete liberation of the senses from the control of the mind."
"If you experience reality as it is," he notes, "then you will just experience bliss. You will see that this whole creation is perfect, that it is the most beautiful thing, that you are in heaven, (and that) you have made it into a hell."
Furthering his explanation of non-duality, liberation and enlightenment, Sri Bhagavan takes his audience through a practical explanation of how we attach to and identify with the contents of our mind - i.e., our thoughts. He then explains how we too often fall into the trap of seeking external relief from the angst or misery that our thoughts create, and what can happen when we let go of our unexamined attachment to our egoic, self-centered thinking.
"It is possible to liberate the senses from the clutches of thought," he notes. "Thought is necessary when required, otherwise why should thought interfere? There is no need for thought to come in and interfere with actual experience."
"Now when the senses become free of the thoughts of the mind," he explains, "we say that you have discovered unconditional joy, unconditional love. Such is this joy, that you will feel you are connected with everybody. You discover true love. . . . And this is an actual occurrence. That is what you are designed to be, that is what a human being is supposed to experience all of the time."
"Since you do not experience that," he continues, "your lives have become miserable. And, to escape that misery, you have created various escape routes, through which all the time you are escaping from your misery; which misery is, itself, because you are not experiencing reality. That is why people take to alcohol or to drugs, or sex or to whatever it is," he notes. "Because otherwise what is there in your life? It becomes meaningless."
"So the whole attempt of (life) is to help you experience reality as it is," he observes. "When that happens you discover unconditional love, and unconditional joy. You feel connected with everything and everybody. You do not feel you are a separate individual; you do not live for yourself alone anymore, because your 'self 'has become everybody. You live for the sake of humanity.
"This is not a concept or some imagined thing," he tells his audience. "This is a day-to-day reality when you become enlightened, or a mukhti."
"Mindsight is the ability of the human mind to see itself. It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner lives with more clarity, tranform the brain, and enhance our relationships with other."
-- Dr. Dan Siegel --
In one of the more insightful videos in an already insightful series of Google TechTalks (below), Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., Co-Director of the UCLA Medical Center's Mindful Awareness Research Center and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, goes where many other mind scientists refuse to go and defines what the 'mind' is. He then takes his audience through a fascinating and informative tour of the brain, highlighting how 'mindfulness' enhances brain function and increases mental and physical health.
"You'd be amazed," says Dr. Siegel, "but a lot of people live there lives just having thoughts, feelings, beliefs and attitudes, having hopes and dreams, and memories and perceptions - all the stuff we can use to describe the mind - but they haven't developed the capacity to actually observe those mental activities as the flow of energy and information, as the mind itself."
"That process of being able to see mental activity with more clarity and then modify it with more efficacy is something you can name with the word 'mindsight,' he says, defining 'mindsight' as "the ability to actually see your mind, not just have one."
"When you look at different areas of research what you find is that when 'mindsight' is present, various ways of understanding mental health are also present. There is something about being able to see and influence your internal world that creates more health."
Dr. Siegel, a developmental psychiatrist by training, then takes his audience through the paradigm-shifting case of the family of a woman whose middle pre-frontal cortex was permanently damaged in a tragic car accident; a woman who, in essence, said that she had "lost her soul."
Siegel describes how the middle pre-frontal cortex of the brain regulates the body, attunes communication, optimizes the flow of emotional balance, inhibits fear, gives an individual the ability to pause before acting (response flexibility), and gives the individual insight (auto-noetic consciousness), self-knowing awareness, the capacity for empathy, the capacity for morality, as well as compassion and intuition, or introception (the ability to 'be in touch with the feelings of the body' that controls the individual's ability to have empathy).
"A healthy mind emerges from integrated systems. Integration, (being) very clearly defined as the linkage of differentiated parts," says Siegel. "So that when you have a nervous system that is integrated you get these nine functions," both in the individual and the family, as well as in larger groups.
In the practice of mindful meditation, notes Siegel, there is a 2,500 year tradition of specific mental training to develop mindfulness traits, and a tradition which is designed to develop all nine systems, centered in the middle pre-frontal cortex. "We have every reason to believe that what you are doing in (practicing meditation), says Siegel, "is strengthening the integrative fibers of the brain, in particular the middle pre-frontal areas."
Thus, he concludes, practicing meditation affects both the ability to approach problem areas in life that the meditator once withdrew from, as well as improving his or her the immune system. "But," he cautions, "(t)he mind uses the brain to create itself, and if the pathways aren't there, the mind can't do it."
"Nothing," Shakespeare observed, "is good or bad, but our thinking makes it so." This truism, from Act II, Scene II of "Hamlet" is one of Shakespeare's most famous lines. It is an original line, but the essence of its meaning is expressed over and over in stories that can be tracked back into the mists of time.
The ancient Ashtavakra Gita - "Gita" meaning "song" in Sanskrit - notes that, "If one thinks of oneself as free, one is free, and if one thinks of oneself as bound, one is bound. Here this saying is true, "Thinking makes it so."
In a very real way, it is our thinking and our perception (quantum scientists would say our conscious observation) that 'crystallizes' our world and our 'reality.' If we judge that reality to be "good," it is "good." If we judge it as "bad," it is "bad." This point is the essential teaching of a traditional Taoist parable:
An old farmer had worked his crops for many years with the help of his wife and his only son. His only possession of any worth was the horse he used to work the fields he rented. And then one day, One day his horse ran away.
The farmer's wife and son were distraught. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "This is terrible," they said. "Such bad luck," they murmured sympathetically.
"Is it good, or is it bad?" the farmer asked.
Several days later the farmer's horse returned, leading a whole herd of wild horses into the farmer's corral. The farmer's wife and son were ecstatic. "How wonderful," the farmer's neighbors exclaimed. "you are the richest man in the village!"
"Is this good, or is it bad?" the farmer mused."We'll see."
The neighbors went away perplexed at the farmer's reaction to such good fortune.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The farmer's wife was unconsolable, sobbing and rubbing ashes over her head and face. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on the farmer's misfortune. "This is awful," they exclaimed. "Such a great misfortune." "Is this good, or is this bad?" the farmer mused." "I just don't know," he said, resignedly. "We'll see."
The neighbors left the farmer, commenting amongst themselves at just how callous the farmer was regarding this grave injury to his only son.
The day after, military officials came to the village and drafted all the young men of the village to fight in a battle few would return from. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out after all
"We'll see" said the farmer.
The farmer was, indeed, dispassionate in the truest sense of the word. He neither suffered from seeming bad news, nor rejoiced for the seeming good. He accepted without judgment life as it presented itself, free of attachment to the course of events.
In a similar story from the Zen Buddhist tradition, the same unattached dispassion is exemplified.
A beautiful girl in the village was pregnant. Her angry parents demanded to know who was the father. At first resistant to confess, the anxious and embarrassed girl finally pointed to Hakuin, the Zen master whom everyone previously revered for living such a pure life.
When the outraged parents confronted Hakuin with their daughter's accusation, he simply replied "Is that so?"
When the child was born, the parents brought it to the Hakuin, who now was viewed as a pariah by the whole village. They demanded that he take care of the child since it was his responsibility.
"Is that so?" Hakuin said calmly as he accepted the child.
For many months he took very good care of the child, until the daughter could no longer withstand the lie she had told. She confessed that the real father was a young man in the village whom she had tried to protect.
The parents immediately went to Hakuin to see if he would return the baby. With profuse apologies they explained what had happened.
"Is that so?" Hakuin said as he handed them the child.
The point is nothing is 'good' or 'bad,' per se. It is our self-centered judgment that imbues everything with its seeming 'goodness' or 'badness.' In doing so, we create our own suffering. "Judge not, lest ye be judged," Jesus cautioned us. He did not mention that we are, the judge, jury and executioner, when we do so.
