..续本文上一页So she didn”t hold much of the romance of that work any longer but still thought it was good and important work.

　　And then as she decided to turn away and go inwards into her own rich life, she found this interesting phenomenon, that wherever she walked - down the street - into the supermarket - she would see one of the dead people she had held. And she would walk into the bank and she would see in the face and the gesture of the person giving her money another of the dead people. And all the people who had died, she had seen, and this marvellous sort of feeling returned. She realised that everything comes back, nothing is lost At the mall, at the supermarket counter. And she heard the sound of their footsteps walking away, the turn of their shoulders rounding a building. And this marked the change for her that was beginning to happen. The outward movement was starting when she was quite securely grounded in the Tao, and there”s something inevitable about the process, perhaps irreversible.

　　So when we go down, we can say we become intimate with the world and the texture of the world becomes alive. It”s not dead anymore. Our thinking is inclined to be Cartesian, and to see the world as objects with bed space between them, and there is a power to this view, a reality to this view. It allows us to manipulate objects. It is rather consoling to that part of us that does not want to stretch and find danger, a part of us that just wants to battle along and be safe.

　　Yet there is another view that is immensely powerful and that overwhelms this Cartesian sense. And this is of the world as an interconnected web, the great image of the Net of Indra in which each link, each cross-thread in the Net holds a jewel and each jewel holds the image of every other jewel, each moment, each person, each twig, infinitely valuable and infintely connected.

　　So when we”ve really gone in for a while and held the question, it does begin to open. It does resolve itself. There are a couple of characteristics about this. One is joy - joy really does come. Sometimes sorrow comes first, oddly enough, and so people end up grieving their dead father or the father they never knew or something like that, and then suddenly they find themselves laughing in the midst of tears and the great engines of satori have taken them off. But sometimes there”s just the joy alone. So joy is very characteristic. One old teacher asked his student, "Are you joyful yet

　　" And he said, "It”s like finding a pearl in a pile of shit." They say even the shit is pearl, all pearl.

　　So we get intimations, we get those little touches of joy where we laugh in the Zendo, something ridiculous occurs to us and it”s funny, or we see somebody”s bare feet and realise they”re exquisitely beautiful with the mud sticking to them. A tiny taste of awakening.

　　The other characteristic is that doubt is set at rest, that core doubt in which we think, "It”s not quite enough. We really need to be doing something else or experiencing something else or being somebody else. We need to be doing it differently, we”re not doing it right and will we survive

　　 and what if

　　" - all that stuff. While we can still get interested in this stuff, somehow it doesn”t have the substantial force that it previously had, it”s not thick and veiling the way it was.

　　And so we begin to get happy and then naturally we are carried into the outward movement. We can”t just sit there, hoarding our treasure like a dragon in a cave. We are led into the world and when we come into the world, we find again that we have to keep up the character work. The character work is vegetable and slow. We find again we do things foolishly. Typically in fact we get very enthusiastic about our first glimpses and we run out and take too much on and then drop i…

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