The search
for happiness is not
about looking at life through
rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself
to the pain and imperfections of the world.
Nor is happiness a state of exultation
to be perpetuated at all costs; it is
the purging of mental toxins,
such as hatred and
obsession.
Intellectual
knowledge exists in
and of the brain. Because the brain is
part of the body, which must one day expire,
this collection of facts, however large
and impressive, will expire
as well.
Insight,
however, is a function of
the spirit. Because your spirit follows
you through cycle after cycle of life, death,
and rebirth, you have the opportunity of cultivating
insight in an ongoing fashion. Refined over time,
insight becomes pure, constant, and
unwavering. This is the beginning
of immortality.
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If
the Way
were about being
a student of something,
it wouldn’t be alive in the world.
It lives because certain people say to
themselves, “All this teaching is
just for me. I am the living
expression of
this.”
This
isn’t arrogant.
This is humbly keeping the
buddhas, Lao Tzu, Lalla, Rumi, Suzuki,
Bahauddin, Yuanwu, all of them, alive in the
world. Only you can accomplish this.
You are the only
one.
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Borrow the beloved’s eyes
Look through them and you’ll see the beloved’s face
everywhere. No tiredness, no jaded boredom.
“I shall be your eye and your hand and your loving.”
Let that happen, and things
you have hated will become helpers.
A certain preacher always prays long and with enthusiasm
for thieves and muggers that attack people
on the street. “Let your mercy, O Lord,
cover their insolence.”
He doesn’t pray for the good,
but only for the blatantly cruel.
Why is this? his congregation asks.
“Because they have done me such generous favors.
Every time I turn back toward the things they want.
I run into them, they beat me, and leave me nearly dead
in the road, and I understand, again, that what they want
is not what I want. They keep me on the spiritual path.
That’s why I honor them, and pray for them.”
Those that make you return, for whatever reason,
to God’s solitude, be grateful to them.
Worry about the others, who give you
delicious comforts that keep you from prayer.
Friends are enemies sometimes,
and enemies friends.
There is an animal called an ushghur, a porcupine
If you hit it with a stick, it extends its quills
and gets bigger. The soul is a porcupine,
made strong by stick-beating.
So a prophet’s soul is especially afflicted,
because it has to become so powerful.
A hide is soaked in tanning liquor and becomes leather.
If the tanner did not rub in the acid,
the hide would get foul-smelling and rotten.
The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.
Work it with manual discipline,
and the bitter tanning acid of grief,
and you’ll become lovely, and very strong.
If you can’t do this work yourself, don’t worry.
You don’t even have to make a decision,
one way or another. The Friend, who knows
a lot more than you do, will bring difficulties,
and grief, and sickness,
as medicine, as happiness,
as the essence of the moment when you’re beaten,
when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say,
with Hallaj’s voice,
I trust you to kill me.
Nothing,
nothing at all is born,
dies, the shell says again and
again from the depth of its hollowness.
Its body swept off by tide — so what? It sleeps
in sand, drying in sunlight, bathing in moonlight.
Nothing to do with sea or anything else.
Over and over it vanishes
with the wave.
