This morning
I felt strong and jaunty in my
mail order Israeli commando trousers.
Up at Hard Luck Ranch I spoke to the ravens
in baritone, fed the cats with manly gestures.
Acacia thorns can’t penetrate these mighty pants,
then out by the corral the infant pup began
to weep, abandoned. In an instant
I became another of the
Earth’s billion sad
mothers.
You still imagine that truth
needs pointing at and telling you: ‘Look, here is truth’.
It is not so. Truth is not the result of an effort, the end of a road.
It is here and now, in the very longing and the search for it. It is nearer than
the mind and the body, nearer than the sense ‘I am’. You do not see it
because you look too far away from yourself, outside your
innermost being. You have objectified truth and
insist on your standard proofs and tests,
which apply only to things
and thoughts…
Truth is not a reward for good behaviour,
nor a prize for passing some tests. It cannot be brought about.
It is the primary, the unborn, the ancient source of all that is. You are
eligible because you are. You need not merit truth. It is your
own. Just stop running away by running after.
Stand still, be quiet.
Flowers,
sesame seed, bowls of fresh water,
a tuft of kusa-grass, all this altar paraphernalia
is not needed by someone who takes
the teacher’s words in and
honestly lives
them.
Full of
longing in meditation,
one sinks into a joy that is free of
any impulse to act and will
not enter a human
birth again.
One has to spend
so many years in learning how
to be happy. I am just beginning to make
some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove
Young’s theory that “as soon as we have found the key of life
it opens the gates of death.” Every year strips us of at least one vain
expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its
stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are
our happiest. What a miserable augury for the
progress of the race and the destination
of the individual if the more matured
and enlightened state is the
less happy one!
Childhood is only
the beautiful and happy time
in contemplation and retrospect:
to the child it is full of deep sorrows,
the meaning of which is unknown. Witness
colic and whooping-cough and dread of ghosts,
to say nothing of hell and Satan, and an offended Deity
in the sky, who was angry when I wanted too much plumcake.
Then the sorrows of older persons, which children see but
cannot understand, are worse than all. All this to prove
that we are happier than when we were seven years
old, and that we shall be happier when we are
forty than we are now, which I call a
comfortable doctrine, and one
worth trying to
believe!
How can I
tell what I’ve seen?
Fall, stand—it’s clear at once.
Wearing my cowl backwards,
I trample the old path.
And the new.