Attain to utmost Emptiness,
Cling single-heartedly to interior peace.
While all things are stirring together,
I only contemplate the Return.
For flourishing as they do,
Each of them will return to its root.
To return to the root is to find peace.
To find peace is to fulfil one’s destiny.
To fulfil one’s destiny is to be constant.
To know the Constant is called Insight.
If one does not know the Constant,
One runs blindly into disasters.
If one knows the Constant,
One can understand and embrace all.
If one understands and embraces all,
One is capable of doing justice.
To be just is to be kingly;
To be kingly is to be heavenly;
To be heavenly is to be one with the Tao;
To be one with the Tao is to abide forever.
Such as one will be safe and whole
Even after the dissolution of his body.
Emptiness is best understood as a state of consciousness and
an attitude. It is an attitude we may
take any moment we like, and does not depend on anything external. The attitude comes first, and if this is
correct, then any time, place or phenomenon is automatically made sacred.
The feeling of Emptiness is a deep peace that is not the
consequence of any situation in the world.
It is not dependent on any beneficial opportunity or good fortune. Although it is the same feeling as we get when
we get to bed after a hard day, the peace of emptiness is ours for the taking
at any time we adopt the correct attitude!
You must forgive the negative approach of explanation, for Emptiness is
what the Book of Philippians calls ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’.
We are told here to ‘cling single-heartedly’ to this peace;
indeed to do so is the way of the Tao.
If the peace is lost, it is lost in its entirety. The moment we allow our thoughts to string
together, one after the other, and when the luminous present is lost to the
shady world of thought – we have entered the realm of time and space and
things, and this is where Emptiness and peace is not.
While all things are stirring together,
I only contemplate the Return.
For flourishing as they do,
Each of them will return to its root.
Emptiness can be known directly by ourselves. But when we depart from emptiness and enter
the realm of time and space, emptiness now features in the form of the
annihilation that comes with death.
The wise person cuts straight to the chase, and enters
directly into the state that all living beings are returning to.
We are perhaps prone to thinking that the two realms (Earth:
time and space; Heaven: infinity and eternity) are distinct and separate, and
the spiritual teacher often can’t help but perpetuate this illusion. But the truth is, time and space is the
lesser reality – a kind of symbolic representation of timeless heaven. Yet this Heaven must be symbolised also, and
so Heaven becomes death, the afterlife.
But we fall into a most pitiable error if we imagine that we must actually die before we enter
heaven. All spiritual teachings insist
that heaven is ‘within us’ or as Jesus says ‘near at hand’. The hard part is getting people to believe
that.
To return to the root is to find peace.
To find peace is to fulfil one’s destiny.
We have already talked about how the root state, emptiness,
is felt as a deep unshakable peace. Now
we read that finding this peace is our destiny.
In other words, all that we do in this life is aiming towards finding
this state of peace.
To many, it might come as a surprise to hear that we all
headed towards spiritual realisation.
And yet the moment we experience the deep transcendent joy and peace for
ourselves, we can’t help but notice its intense familiarity! It is the deepest feeling of home-coming we
have ever felt, and I mean this literally.
In fact, you realise that finally getting home after a long, hard
business trip, to your own bed amid your own things, is nothing more than a
kind of weak metaphor for THIS, the true and real homecoming.
All that we call good and pleasurable in our everyday life
is of the same nature as spiritual bliss.
They are different not in quality but in quantity. Anyone who feels pleasure, is acquainted
thereby with God, the Tao. And as we
mature in life we become adept at finding God in ever deeper and more
long-lasting ways. Becoming more
‘spiritual’ is nothing other than developing more sophisticated techniques to
bring pleasure. This is why the text
says that finding peace as a permanent state is akin to fulfilling our destiny. We
have finally mastered living.
To fulfil one’s destiny is to be constant.
To know the Constant is called Insight.
We are constant because through our knowledge we become one
with the eternal principle which is above birth, death and change. This principle is felt at any moment. All else changes, except this.
We are now possessed of Insight, which might also be called
discernment. Before we only saw the
differences between all the people and things in the world. This led to us being fooled by
characteristics that weren’t essential.
To know the Constant is to know the essential nature of all things. Now we are not readily fooled and are in a
true position to observe the patterns of change in the world. We start to see
what shall come next. We become skilful and wise.
If one does not know the Constant,
One runs blindly into disasters.
If one knows the Constant,
One can understand and embrace all.
If we are being cautious and accept the possibility of our
ignorance we are unlikely to ‘run blindly’.
On the other hand, it is when we are firmly convinced of our
understanding that we march boldly on and actually hasten our own downfall.
How does our erroneous state of conviction arise? It happens when we draw false conclusions
from the past, and think that there will be a repeat of something when it is
not scheduled by the Tao to happen. Physicist
Richard Feynman observed this error of reasoning in the real world in what he
called Cargo Cult Science:
“In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they
saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to
happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires
along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with
two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out
like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land.
They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way
it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these
things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and
forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because
the planes don't land.”
We see this all-too-human tendency very plainly when it comes
to those naïve to our actions, but in our own everyday affairs, only the sage
has the vantage point we seek.
Our first and fundamental mistake is to attribute objective
reality to things that have no independent existence. Our second error is to imagine that we are
part of this reality: as individuals existing in time and space amid other
individuals. Our third and fatal error
is to imagine that we have our own private will that can make things happen
independently of the overall causal nexus.
Like the South Sea Islanders who imagined they could materialise goods
through their own device, we blindly chase outcomes that should not and cannot
happen, creating havoc for ourselves in the process.
Only with the detachment and objectivity that comes with
true wisdom, and the self-confidence to let things unfold as they will, will we
be able to ‘understand and embrace all.’
If one understands and embraces all,
One is capable of doing justice.
To be just is to be kingly;
To be kingly is to be heavenly;
With this wise overarching perspective, and with the absence
of a personal agenda, we finally have the skill that is so precious to society:
judgement. The direction any judgement
shall take is impossible to fathom. Each
case shall be taken on its own merit, and a wise judge would never be what the
world would consider to be consistent.
Indeed, consistency, and formulated punishments for definable categories
of crime is what a society must resort to when there is no wise sage available
to judge truly and skilfully.
All we can bear in mind is that what looks like misfortune
to day may well be good fortune tomorrow.
And what the individual mortal in us finds hard to tolerate might be
just the thing needed for our spiritual development. The sage therefore is able to truly be the
sovereign that brings stability to a society.
And because he acts not for himself, but in accordance with the
imperatives of the Tao, we can consider his judgements to be divinely ordained.
To be one with the Tao is to abide forever.
Such as one will be safe and whole
Even after the dissolution of his body.
The person who has seen that the world of time and space is
just a one-sided perspective of reality has seen that death is not, and has
never been something that actually happens
to us. Such a person has found a new
place to root his consciousness, and that place is above time, and also above eternity;
above space and also above infinity.
He cannot go back to his former beliefs – once he has seen
through the world of time and space as being a naïve delusion, or a kind of
dream, however hard he might try, he cannot undo what has been done.
His body is being born and then instantly dying all the time
anyway. If one day it never again does
one of those infinitely fast flashes into awareness, the sage will hardly
notice that it is gone. Something else will be at hand.
But most importantly, he is safe and whole. Perturbation of spirit is for those who
believe they have a body. This is no
longer his way.
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