..续本文上一页ing to endlessly empty my life so that something better could come in. That this is the experience of character that happens in a good spiritual center. The soul work always does go on. In fact, I remember not being very interested in enlightenment any more. I was interested, but not--let it take care of itself, I thought. I obviously couldn”t effect it, so I wouldn”t bother with it too much, and becoming more interested in--my meditation became much looser, much less pure, became much less interested in creating states of mind. Technique, I think, is one of the vices of spirit along with arrogance, because the spirit always thinks that if we get another technique, we”ll be able to stay in our spirit place forever, where everything”s pure. Whereas soul knows that no technique is really going to help you. And some time you”re going to die and you”re going to lose people you love and you”re going to have to find your beauty there, too, in the autumn leaves as well as in the spring.
In our tradition, what we do is after somebody”s had some sort of spiritual opening, we try to keep them around and not let them go because people then usually tend to have a spiritual opening and go out and commit disasters upon the world because there is an over confidence, a grandiosity that comes with spirit when it”s not being tempered. It”s a terrible thing to be a new zen teacher. I speak from experience. There is a tempering that needs to go on, an acknowledgment of our vulnerability and all the things that we don”t know. The simultaneity of our wisdom and our foolishness. This is "The Clearly Enlightened Person Falls into a Well" koan. You can actually have a very deep understanding of the spiritual world and still do something stupid and still have areas of your life that are inferior and you”re not very good at, kind of stupid at, and that doesn”t make you a less spiritual person. But noticing it makes you a more spiritual person. Being prepared have the shame of it and the disappointment of it, because it”s very hard on your grandiosity, somehow that allows the spirit to come through in this purer way. Then something real can happen. Real teaching can happen. Real love can happen and the beauty of the world is the beauty of the Buddha”s path just there before us then. But it”s not if we”re not prepared to accept our own stupidity, not in a complacent way, but in a way that”s engaged. We notice what we”re not very good at. We notice our pain when we”re in it and allow it there. We have to allow the darkness in the world in order to experience the light. Our first move, you see, in spirit is always to transcend. We always want to go straight to the light. My own experience was of going up and then down and then not knowing which way was which after a while, I suppose. We have to let in, in some way hold, the opposites, hold the very small parts of who we are along with the rather grand, eternal parts of who we are and not let one take over. When one takes over we become less than human.
If the soul takes over, it”s just full of longing and vapors. We get moody all the time and nobody can bear us. That soul consciousness, that very personal consciousness, notice how transient it is and it”s always trying to shore itself up with a new cadillac or whatever it is, chocolate, a new spouse, a new something. It”s in love with the productions of time. It always wants to go out and do a mystical fusion with things. Spirit knows that things are always coming into existence and passing away and isn”t so impressed and is a very good counteraction to the soul point of view. Psychotherapy is very riddled with the soul point of view in good ways, often, I think, but often misses the spirit. Or when it does take up the spirit is often very mechanistic; like, …
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