Enlightenment
is not an asexual, dispassionate,
head-in-the-clouds, nails-in-the-palms
disappearance from the game of life. It’s a
volcanic, kick-ass, erotic commitment
to love in action, coupled with
hard-headed practical
grist.
QUESTION.
Everyone has a secret agenda.
What’s yours?
ANSWER.
To show what a moral vision
would look like if it were rooted in the quest
for beauty, truth, love, pleasure, and liberation
instead of order, control, politeness,
fear, and self-denial.
To achieve
what the zen buddhists
call “beginner’s mind,” you dispense
with all preconceptions and enter
each situation as if seeing it
for the first time.
“In the
beginner’s mind there
are many possibilities,” wrote
Shunryu Suzuki in his book Zen Mind,
Beginner’s Mind, “but in the
expert’s there are few.”
As much
as I love beginner’s
mind, though, I advocate an
additional discipline: cultivating a
beginner’s heart. That means approaching
every encounter imbued with a freshly
invoked wave of love that is as pure
as if you’re feeling it for
the first time.