..续本文上一页icks in sometimes when you”re very sick, if you”re close to death, you notice that your life is perfect at that moment even though you”re dying. That sort of experience. It”s a very classic spirit experience. It”s very helpful, and in our culture it”s helpful, because we tend to get stuck in objects a lot in our culture and it drags us out of the shopping malls and into noticing our lives and noticing how much richness there is all around us without having to go into the shopping malls in the first place. Spirit has a loveliness to it and a blissful transcendent quality to it and it”s got a great rigor to it, too. If you sit in a zen center, you sit cross legged for a long time and if your body doesn”t hurt, you”re very remarkable, and if the pain in your body doesn”t get extreme, you”re remarkable, too. Eventually we come to a different understanding about pain, hopefully. There is a freeing quality in spirit. Even if I die, I know that the world is--there”s something wonderful I can rest on. We”re not so afraid when we have this experience and we feel like we belong on the earth. We know who we are and where we stand. That”s such a wonderful thing that it really does change your life. There”s less attachment to things we know. We”re more fluid and open, hopefully, to the new.
But then there”s this whole other part of the world that seems neglected by this fascination with spirit. Spirit has its own sort of darkness that seems to come with it. This other part of life seems to balance it. I think of the pleasures that are very transitory--chocolate and lingerie, things like that--but are very real interests of human beings, and obviously, they can”t be outside buddha nature. From the spirit”s point of view they”re all fine, they”re all one, they”re just like the moonlight, but then there”s another part of us that prefers this kind of chocolate or prefers chocolate to corn flakes or something like that. That part of character, we might say, that wants to be heard and if it”s not heard and if it”s ignored and if you just cut off its head, something bad happens in the spiritual training. I”ll talk about what some of those bad things are as we go along.
I found in my own training this twofold impulse. One was towards the eternal and the spiritual and wanting to have a wonderful big enlightenment experience and solve everything. Just really see how the world was put together and lead a really good life that was sort of flawless. And the other impulse was towards the transitory, neglected, small and furious sort of world, which is not the life eternal, but the life that we die of and we die of living it well. That”s just a truth that we can”t get away from.
My theory about all this was that when we took the great traditions out of Asia, we brought across the spirit but soul is a local thing and we didn”t bring that with it. Then we”d try to have this event often which was a very purely spiritual event, but it wasn”t sufficiently inhabited. So we had all these scandals that you know and love and still are fascinating to us and we”re still trying to work out what they”re about, I think. A teacher sleeping with his students, power trips, all sorts of stuff that went on. I think that that was the soul”s revenge. "If you neglect me, watch out." It”s the dark thing in the corner of the room that we think is so insignificant, but suddenly we turn around and its grown and it grabs us.
What I think our task is is to inhabit and find the personal modes to inhabit the great traditions like zen. The tradition of depth psychotherapy can help some there. I think we need to honor and notice the ways in which the zen tradition itself develops soul and develops character. I just wanted to get enlightened. I didn”t give a damn how I did it. I came to…
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