..续本文上一页t and then start feeling bad. We make mistakes that we realise we could have avoided and we just have to accept that this too is the truth of the Way.

　　Two images come to me. The first is that the inside is often patchy. It is like some sun shining through the cloud, but the cloud keeps shifting and the place where the light hits keeps moving over the paddock and suddenly we”re not in it anymore and we wonder what we did. We get a glimpse and it”s gone and then we get a stronger glimpse but damn, it”s gone again. And then we get a stronger glimpse and we”re really sure we saw the ox, but the next day we”re not sure if we saw the ox and we begin to doubt.

　　So this is where the character work really counts. If you”ve been working with yourself, understanding that you must live your own life, even while you”re working for insight, then this will hold you through the doubt. We can bear it and endure it. It is like childbirth, we just have to wait and go through all those phases and the transition hurts a great deal sometimes, but in the end inevitably there is a child and we have to trust that the child will come. Anyway there is no choice but to trust, because you can”t do anything once you”re launched. You are giving birth and when it seems like nothing is happening, there”s no use panicking and running around, it really doesn”t help the birth. You”re welcome to if you wish, but you will just have to give birth. And when it happens and in a sense you have given birth, it”s not the patchiness and the haziness so much as a discontinuity, a post-Einsteinian event.

　　The term "interleaving" comes to me, where the world of enlightenment and the world in which we can”t find enlightenment are wedged into each other, like a lattice. Someone talking about this invented the term "inter-tissuing", which seems both Shakespearean and medical to me. Where the sunlight and the darkness form lines together and we”re always stumbling across one or the other and we will simultaneously have difficulty and ease, have a sense of a great clarity about the world and a sense of not knowing what to do in our life right now.

　　I think at this stage we begin to trust that we can really see it, even though sometimes we can”t really see it. I think that discontinuity, this interleaving is steadier than the phase where everything is patchy. We are closer to resolving the question for good because we are more in the place from which questions can be resolved.

　　Someone once described what I think of this place to mean quite well. She came in and told me about this wonderful glimpse - that everything in the universe and all the trees and the children all sing the great song of the Buddha and she is them and they are her and all those good things. And she was very excited and interested, but had to hold onto it a little bit and then went out and at her work and she lost it all. She felt that in clinging onto her glimpse, she had not done her work very well, and felt ashamed and guilty about this very characteristic movement I spoke of before.

　　And then she said something that I thought was really good, and indicated her willingness to do the character work. "I don”t want to be where I”m not. I don”t want to be someone I am not. I will be where I am." And there”s the integrity coming through and if we are willing to have that, it will carry us and the next opening will be greater. And then we”ll fall again on our face and then the next opening will be great but we can trust that it will take us along.

　　A friend of mine I have often spoken about was given a leukemia diagnosis quite a long time ago. After he received his diagnosis he and his wife decided to have a son, who is now five years old. And recently I stopped off to speak to him in Honolulu on the way to come to…

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