The Calf Path
by Sam Walter Foss (1858–1911)
One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail, as all calves do.
Since then three hundred years have fled,
Since then three hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day
The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bellwether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bellwethers always do.
And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made,
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because ’twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed — do not laugh —
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.
This forest path became a lane,
This forest path became a lane,
That bent, and turned, and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet.
The road became a village street,
And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare,
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Each day a hundred thousand rout
Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed that zigzag calf about,
And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They follow still his crooked way,
And lose one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.
A moral lesson this might teach
A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah, many things this tale might teach
But I am not ordained to preach.
Wonder why we simply refuse to question very questionably differing phraseology and word choice that doesn’t seem to be remotely commensurate with what Jesus says in the whole contextual culling of Matthew, Mark and Luke? I am throughly and utterly convinced after researching the Old Testament scribe’s knavery as well as both the Catholic and Protestant angling and arguing over freaking words since the historical accidents of the printing press as profoundly and pejoratively placed next to the power hungry reformational food fighting fiasco some 500 years ago. Theologians, as a whole, have done more harm to how God, Christ and the rarely mentioned Holy Spirit have been distorted legalistically simply to conveniently keep those congregational crowds coming back. Making the Creator of the universe and unknowability an academic letter of supposed higher learning? Theology degrees are in high demand by the fervently fearful and that of all ‘learned’ and often power-based positions held, that the greatest number of narcissistic personality disordered individuals are invariably found among those who are titled Clergy. Immediately behind priests, pastors, reverends, preachers, deacons and other self-identified moralistically hubristic men of the cloth are doctors, followed not surprisingly by lawyers. Each who are cut from this ilk tend to have a Messianic complex.
Three men stood by the ocean, looking at the same sunset. One man saw the immense physical beauty and enjoyed the event in itself. This man was the “sensate” type who, like 80 percent of the world, deals with what he can see, feel, touch, move, and fix. This was enough reality for him, for he had little interest in larger ideas, intuitions, or the grand scheme of things. He saw with his first eye, which was good. A second man saw the sunset. He enjoyed all the beauty that the first man did. Like all lovers of coherent thought, technology, and science, he also enjoyed his power to make sense of the universe and explain what he discovered. He thought about the cyclical rotations of planets and stars. Through imagination, intuition, and reason, he saw with his second eye, which was even better. The third man saw the sunset, knowing and enjoying all that the first and the second men did. But in his ability to progress from seeing to explaining to “tasting,” he also remained in awe before an underlying mystery, coherence, and spaciousness that connected him with everything else. He used his third eye, which is the full goal of all seeing and all knowing. This was the best.
THE URGENT NEED FOR CONTEMPLATIVE SEEING
Third-eye seeing is the way the mystics see. They do not reject the first eye; the senses matter to them, but they know there is more. Nor do they reject the second eye; but they know not to confuse knowledge with depth or mere correct information with the transformation of consciousness itself. 7 The mystical gaze builds upon the first two eyes — and yet goes further. It happens whenever, by some wondrous “coincidence,” our heart space, our mind space, and our body awareness are all simultaneously open and nonresistant. I like to call it presence. It is experienced as a moment of deep inner connection, and it always pulls you, intensely satisfied, into the naked and undefended now, which can involve both profound joy and profound sadness. At that point, you either want to write poetry, pray, or be utterly silent. In the early medieval period, two Christian philosophers at the monastery of St. Victor in Paris had names for these three ways of seeing, and these names had a great influence on scholars and seekers in the Western tradition. Hugh of St. Victor (1078– 1141) and Richard of St. Victor (1123– 1173) wrote that humanity was given three different sets of eyes, each building on the previous one. The first eye was the eye of the flesh (thought or sight), the second was the eye of reason (meditation or reflection), and the third eye was the eye of true understanding (contemplation).
You already know. The Spirit is with you and the Spirit is in you. — JOHN 14: 17
The future is by definition the unsayable and the uncontrollable, filled with paradoxes, mysteries, and confusions. It is an imperfect world at every level. Therefore the future is always, somehow, scary. We attempt to build for ourselves many protections against this imperfection, even in the patterns of our mind. This unsayable future — preparing for it and also fearing it — determines much of our lives. Thus we search for predictability, explanation, and order to give ourselves some sense of peace and control. Even much of religion itself has become a search for social order, group cohesion, and personal worthiness, or a way of escaping into the next world, which unfortunately destroys most of its transformative power. True spirituality is not a search for perfection or control or the door to the next world; it is a search for divine union now. The great discovery is always that what we are searching for has already been given! I did not find it; it found me. It is Jacob’s shout of Eureka! at the foot of his ladder to heaven in Genesis 28: 16– 17. Union and perfection are two different journeys with very different strategies. Common religion seeks private perfection; the mystics seek and enjoy the foundation itself — divine union, totally given. Personal perfection insists on private knowing and certitude. Surprisingly, union is a much better way of knowing. It is a shared knowing that is much more solid and consoling. I promise you that this will make more sense as the book unfolds, but in the meantime just ask anyone in love if this is not true. The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection — and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth. This is what makes Jesus so counterintuitive to most eras and cultures, and why most never perceived the great good news in this utter shift of consciousness. That failure to understand his core message, and a concrete program by which you could experience this truth for yourself, is at the center of our religious problem today. We looked for hope where it was never promised, and no one gave us the proper software so we could know hope for ourselves, least of all in disorder and imperfection!
Catholics and Orthodox make the Holy Spirit depend on membership and sacraments; Protestants make the Spirit depend on a personal decision or faith as a technique. In both cases, we are back in charge; we are the doers. There is no undergoing. Only people who have undergone some level of conversion can be told they have the Holy Spirit and be prepared to understand what one is talking about. Life will then “fan it into flame” (2 Timothy 1: 6), but they will always and forever know that the fire was given from Elsewhere. There is absolutely nothing you can do to earn or get the Holy Spirit; there is nothing at all you can do to attain the divine indwelling (e.g., Romans 8: 10, Galatians 3: 1– 5). 4 Don’t try to “believe” in the Holy Spirit as one doctrine among others. Instead, practice drawing from this deep well within you, and then you will naturally believe. Put the horse first, and it will draw the cart. At the same time, there is nothing you can do to lose the Holy Spirit; the most you can do, as Ephesians cleverly says, is to “grieve” the existing Presence that is “sealed” within you (4: 30). You can, therefore, be ignorant of your birthright. You can neglect the gift, and thus not enjoy its wonderful fruits. That seems to be the case with many people, and is what we mean by “sinners.” The word signifies not moral inferiors so much as people who do not know who they are and whose they are, people who have no connection to their inherent dignity and importance. They have to struggle for it by all kinds of futile performances. What a waste. Thus, do not hate “sinners” or look down on them. Feel sorry for what they are missing out on! Why do we have this gift and yet not realize it? Perhaps God does not want to force anything on us that we do not actually desire or choose for ourselves. So a lovely dance ensues between God and the soul that preserves freedom on both sides. The gift is objectively already within, and yet has to be desired and awakened by the person. But you never know that it is within until after it is awakened! This is another paradox. Faith is often clarified and joy-filled hindsight — after we have experienced our experiences. But the path ahead still demands walking in trust, risk, and various degrees of darkness. Henceforth, you will remember in the darkness what you once experienced in the light. But the path ahead will always be a necessary mixture of darkness and light. In the Judeo-Christian creation story, humans were created in the very “image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1: 26). Our DNA is divine. The divine indwelling is never earned by any behavior whatsoever or any ritual, but only recognized and realized (Romans 11: 6, Ephesians 2: 8– 10) and fallen in love with. When you are ready, you will be both underwhelmed and overwhelmed at the boundless mystery of your own humanity. You will know you are standing under the same waterfall of mercy as everybody else and receiving an undeserved radical grace, which gets to the root of everything.
Third-eye seeing is the way the mystics see. They do not reject the first eye; the senses matter to them, but they know there is more. Nor do they reject the second eye; but they know not to confuse knowledge with depth or mere correct information with the transformation of consciousness itself. 7 The mystical gaze builds upon the first two eyes — and yet goes further. It happens whenever, by some wondrous “coincidence,” our heart space, our mind space, and our body awareness are all simultaneously open and nonresistant. I like to call it presence. It is experienced as a moment of deep inner connection, and it always pulls you, intensely satisfied, into the naked and undefended now, which can involve both profound joy and profound sadness. At that point, you either want to write poetry, pray, or be utterly silent. In the early medieval period, two Christian philosophers at the monastery of St. Victor in Paris had names for these three ways of seeing, and these names had a great influence on scholars and seekers in the Western tradition. Hugh of St. Victor (1078– 1141) and Richard of St. Victor (1123– 1173) wrote that humanity was given three different sets of eyes, each building on the previous one. The first eye was the eye of the flesh (thought or sight), the second was the eye of reason (meditation or reflection), and the third eye was the eye of true understanding (contemplation). 8 I cannot emphasise strongly enough that the separation and loss of these three necessary eyes is at the basis of much of the short-sight-edness and religious crises of the Western world. Lacking such wisdom, it is very difficult for churches, governments, and leaders to move beyond ego, the desire for control, and public posturing. Everything divides into oppositions such as liberal vs. conservative, with vested interests pulling against one another. Truth is no longer possible at this level of conversation. Even theology becomes more a quest for power than a search for God and Mystery. One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing and action. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that “us-and-them” seeing, and the dualistic thinking that results, is the foundation of almost all discontent and violence in the world. 9 It allows heads of religion and state to avoid their own founders, their own national ideals, and their own better instincts. Lacking the contemplative gaze, such leaders will remain mere functionaries and technicians, without any big picture to guide them for the long term. The world and the churches are filled with such people, often using God language as a cover for their own lack of certainty or depth. The third-eye person has always been the saint, the seer, the poet, the metaphysician, or the authentic mystic who grasped the whole picture. There is more to the mystical gaze, however, than having “ecstatic visions.” If people have ignored the first and the second eyes, their hold on the third eye is often temporary, shallow, and incapable of being shared with anybody else. We need true mystics who see with all three sets of eyes, not eccentrics, fanatics, or rebels. The true mystic is always both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know.
Now do not let the word “mystic” scare you off. It simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience. All spiritual traditions agree that such a movement is possible, desirable, and available to everyone. In fact, Jesus seems to say that this is the whole point! (See, for example, John 10: 19– 38.) Some call this movement conversion, some call it enlightenment, some transformation, and some holiness. It is Paul’s “third heaven,” where he “heard things that must not and cannot be put into human language” (2 Corinthians 12: 2, 4). Consciously or not, far too much organized religion has a vested interest in keeping you in the first or second heaven, where all can be put into proper language and deemed certain. This keeps you coming back to church, and it keeps us clergy in business. This is not usually the result of ill will on anybody’s part; it’s just that you can lead people only as far as you yourself have gone. As we will see later, transformed people transform people. From the way they talk so glibly about what is always Mystery, it’s clear that many clergy have never enjoyed the third heaven themselves, and they cannot teach what they do not know. Theological training without spiritual experience is deadly. We are ready to see and taste the full sunset now and no longer need to prove it or even describe it. We just enjoy it — and much more!
Recently I was watching a televised debate between advocates of creationism or “Intelligent Design” and evolution. There were educated people on both sides of the question, many in highly professional positions. I kept waiting for someone to say, “This is a bogus framing of the question” or “This does not need to be a problem,” but in the entire two hours, not a single person did! The two sides just continued to harden their positions with well-argued language that broadly represented either a scientific worldview or a Creator-God worldview. They saw one another as enemies; at times the conversation grew quite fiery, and of course it went nowhere — nothing but defensive and affronted minds. I hoped for the scientists to open up to the possibility of the central importance of mythic meanings for the soul, for sanity, and for culture, but they kept beating one drum of facts and information without reflecting on the context or the meaning of those facts. I hoped for the religious people to take incarnation seriously and recognize the brilliance of a God who creates things that keep creating themselves, but they too kept beating one drum — of an extremely unimaginative and uninvolved God. It was all so sad, so futile, so unnecessary. Both sides should have known better. KNOWING WORSE: ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING Watching the debaters deeply frustrated me, but honestly, I do the same. More than with any other personality trait in my life, all-or-nothing thinking has caused me to make huge mistakes and bad judgments, hurt people and myself, withhold love, and misinterpret situations. And this pattern of dualistic or polarity thinking is deeply entrenched in most Western people, despite its severe limitations. Binary thinking is not wrong or bad in itself — in fact, it is necessary in many if not most situations. But it is completely inadequate for the major questions and dilemmas of life. Why do we do this to ourselves and one another? Don’t I know that every viewpoint is a view from a point? Why can’t I stand back and calmly observe that I always have a preference or bias or need, perhaps even a good and helpful one? Don’t I know by now that some of the information is never all of the information? What is it that makes it so hard to backtrack from my position once I’ve declared it in my mind, and especially if I declare it publicly? This ability to stand back and calmly observe my inner dramas, without rushing to judgment, is foundational for spiritual seeing. It is the primary form of “dying to the self” that Jesus lived personally and the Buddha taught experientially. The growing consensus is that, whatever you call it, such calm, egoless seeing is invariably characteristic of people at the highest levels of doing and loving in all cultures and religions. They are the ones we call sages or wise women or holy men. They see like the mystics see. We have not been practically or systematically taught this higher-level seeing in the West, however, for some centuries now. That is a major theme in this book. The tragic results have been rationalism, secularism, and atheism on the Left and fundamentalism, tribal thinking, and cognitive rigidity on the Right. Neither is serving us well. This is why I question whether religion is doing its job. Fortunately, we still have the perennial and older tradition. With apologies to conservative Christians, this is the much older and more solid tradition, and from it we can again be taught.
Today the unnecessary suffering on this earth is great for people who could have “known better” and should have been taught better by their religions. In the West, religion became preoccupied with telling people what to know more than how to know, telling people what to see more than how to see. We ended up seeing Holy Things faintly, trying to understand Great Things with a whittled-down mind, and trying to love God with our own small and divided heart. It has been like trying to view the galaxies with a $ 5 pair of binoculars. As you will see, contemplation, my word for this larger seeing, keeps the whole field open; it remains vulnerable before the moment, the event, or the person — before it divides and tries to conquer or control it. Contemplatives refuse to create false dichotomies, dividing the field for the sake of the quick comfort of their ego. They do not rush to polarity thinking to take away their mental anxiety. They are like Nicodemus (John 3: 3 and 7: 50) and Gamaliel (Acts 5: 34– 39, 22: 3), well-trained Jewish lawyers, solid in their own tradition, who were still willing to give Jesus an opening and even respect, though the entire establishment had made its final damning judgment. Jesus fit no current or common definition of holiness in his time or within his group. In their world, they were not rational or right-minded at all. On some level, both Nicodemus and Gamaliel were contemplatives, breaking through to nondual thinking. I would like to call contemplation “full-access knowing” — not irrational, but prerational, nonrational, rational, and transrational all at once. Contemplation refuses to be reductionistic. Contemplation is an exercise in keeping your heart and mind spaces open long enough for the mind to see other hidden material. It is content with the naked now and waits for futures given by God and grace. As such, a certain amount of love for an object and for myself must precede any full knowing of it. As the Dalai Lama says so insightfully, “A change of heart is always a change of mind.” You could say the reverse as well — a change of mind is also a change of heart. Eventually they both must change for us to see properly. Western Judeo-Christians are often uncomfortable with the word “nonduality.” They often associate it (negatively) with Eastern religions. I am convinced, however, that Jesus was the first nondual religious teacher of the West, and one reason we have failed to understand so much of his teaching, much less follow it, is because we tried to understand it with a dualistic mind. 11 That will be another major theme in this book, but I will have to clear away the debris from many sides so that instead of taking my word for it, you can see it for yourself. This brilliant word, nonduality (advaita in Sanskrit), was used by many in different traditions in the East to distinguish from total and perfect absorption or enmeshment. Facing some of the same challenges of modern-day ecology and quantum physics, they did not want to say that all things were metaphysically or physically identical, nor did they want to separate and disconnect everything. In effect, the contemplative mind in East or West withholds from labeling things or categorizing them too quickly, so it can come to see them in themselves, apart from the words or concepts that become their substitutes. Humans tend to think that because they agree or disagree with the idea of a thing, they have realistically encountered the thing itself. Not at all true, says the contemplative. It is necessary to encounter the thing in itself. “Presence” is my word for this encounter, a different way of knowing and touching the moment. It is much more vulnerable, and leaves us without a sense of control. Thomas had his idea of Jesus, but had to trustfully put his finger into his side before he could “know” the truth (John 20: 27). Such panoramic and deeper seeing requires a lot of practice, but the rewards are superb and, I believe, necessary for both joy and truth in this world. The fact that nonpolarity thinking is at the core of three of the world’s greatest religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism — demands that we give it at least a “Gamaliel hearing.” I will try to demonstrate that although we did not use the precise word “nondual,” the idea was consistently assumed, implied, and even taught in Christianity for at least sixteen hundred years.
I have often wondered how we could have lost such vast wisdom from the ages. I expect no more from the systems of power, which need to be dualistic in order to survive. But unfortunately, organized religion today too often offers easy and false dichotomies to its own mass membership. Whether popes, patriarchs, mullahs, rabbis, imams, bishops, or clerics, many who should be elders and teachers, and should know better from their own study and prayer, seem to be strongly invested in either-or thinking. It gives them a sense of certitude, clear authority, and control over all the confusing data.
Once you must speak for any group, a whole set of biases necessarily come into play. It has little to do with bad intentions on the part of individuals. Protocols, procedures, policies, consistency, hiring and firing, communion and excommunication — all become quite necessary, it seems. At this level, we all become invested in what Wallace Stevens called “a blessed rage for order,” even though our founder, Jesus, seemed quite comfortable with the constant disorder of his world. How do we reconcile these two? Is it even possible? A large percentage of religious people become and remain quite rigid thinkers because their religion taught them that to be faithful, obedient, and stalwart in the ways of God, they had to create order. They too are not bad people; they simply never learned much about wisdom, paradox, or mystery as the very nature of faith. When so many become professional church workers without going through spiritual transformation at any deep level, religious work becomes a career, and church becomes something one “attends.” Real transformation is not called for or even desired. 12 This has been going on for centuries, and in all religions. Throughout history, contemplative seeing appears to be the minority position, which is probably what Jesus is so disappointed with in the Judaism of his time. Many of the folks in Jesus’ time, particularly the leaders, simply cannot see what he sees (e.g., Matthew 13: 13ff.). It has nothing to do with his being the “Son of God” or having special access to truth, or he would not be able to find the religious leaders culpable. He keeps saying, in effect, “You all should know better. You do not know your own wonderful Jewish tradition.” Like any true reformer or prophet, Jesus critiques Judaism from within, by its own criteria and its own documents. 13 This is what I hope to do here for Christianity or any religion. Too often, religion offers more doctrinal conclusions, more competing truth claims in the increasingly large marketplace of religious claims, but seldom does it give people a vision, process, and practices whereby they can legitimate those truth claims for themselves — by inner experience and actual practices. In my own Catholic tradition, the official church has invariably kept mystics, hermits, charismatic types, and “prayer people” at arms’ length — at least until they have been dead for a hundred years and can be sanitized. I understand this, because their experiences usually cannot be packaged for mass consumption. In fact, I am convinced that most of the major beliefs and doctrines of the Christian churches can be understood, relished, and effectively lived only by nondual consciousness, by contemplatives, by people who know how to be present to the naked and broad now (e.g., Jesus is “fully human and fully divine,” Mary is both virgin and mother, bread is still bread and yet Jesus, etc.). They alone know deeply and include widely. As Karl Rahner is often quoted as saying, “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’ … or he will cease to be anything at all.”
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have not been known for creating “harmonizing” people. In general, peacemaking, non-violence, love for the outsider or the poor, humility, and dialogue have never been the strength of these religions. Even though many people in each group attained higher levels of transformation, our concern was usually group order, consistency, organization, and clarifying and enforcing of membership requirements: not all bad, but not all good either, because we lost some essential values that the harmony-based religions preserved. (Members of those religions could probably identify values they lost as well.) The fact that the two great wars emerged in a Christian Europe filled with churches and theology schools needs to be examined. The fact that racism, profound social inequity, and anti-Semitism were not broadly recognized as a serious problem until almost two thousand years after Jesus is forever a judgment on the immaturity of Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant. Communism often emerged in formerly Christian cultures where social injustice had not been addressed in any serious way (China being the major exception). The former colonies of Latin America have never been known for even minimal social justice since their inception, despite their Catholic identity. The genocide of American Indians and the enslavement of black Africans seems not to have been a problem for North American Protestants. Sexism did not begin to be seriously faced until after the 1950s, and its remedies are still ignored and even resisted by most patriarchal churches. Elitism, classism, torture, homophobia, poverty, and the degradation of the earth are still largely unaddressed by the ordinary monotheistic “believer.” Such issues do not count in most salvation theories. I list all these not to be negative, but to let us see the very real limitations of the overdefining and over-asserting of the individual self and its private salvation — and the expansion of that false self into ideas such as “my Christian country.” The individual became “individuated” in the West, without any keen awareness of the common good or the harmonizing of body, mind, heart, and community. That highly individuated personality colonized the world and spread its conquering version of Christianity.
Here is a true story that might illustrate what others have to teach us. Perhaps it can invite us Westerners out of our left brains and into our “other hemisphere.” A friend of mine, Thomas Williams, once brought back a stack of photos from a monastery he visited in Tibet. Older and younger monks were pictured in what was called, in our translation, the “consequentalist debate.” In every photo there was a young monk seated on the ground and an older one seemingly circling around him. In many of the pictures, one or both of them was smiling or gesturing. He told me that during the young novice’s training, he or she is presented over a period of three years with each and every one of the Buddha’s teachings. During that time, she has to name all of the difficult and problematic consequences that would follow from observing this teaching. After each answer, the older monks clap their hands in approval, and they smile at one another. When all of the possible negative consequences are exhausted, they move onto the good consequences. The same procedure is followed until all of the good consequences have been unpacked, no matter how many hours or days it takes. And again, after each answer, the masters clap their hands, and they smile at one another. It appears to be patient and disciplined training in nonpolarity thinking and in broader reflection and discrimination. There is no declaration of the perfect answer or the wrong answer. The novice is quite simply being taught how to weigh and discern, see and understand the good and bad consequences — and from that open field, to learn himself and learn how to wisely advise others. What an utterly different structure compared to a Western debate style! With us, one must win and the other must lose. (This is our style of religion, too.) Here is the clincher. The only way you can lose the consequentalist debate is to stop smiling! Obviously, this calls for a letting go of the ego. Have you ever noticed that in any situation, when your ego is invested, afraid, or needy, it’s very hard to smile? But when the truth is not your personal possession, it is very easy to smile. The concern in Tibetan Buddhism is not to achieve a conceptually perfect answer, which then has to be defended, but to call forth a happy, loving, aware, and perceptive human being. Is that not one type of “salvation”? The impulse behind this world-view is reflected in the wider society.
I have wondered why the reasons for most wars in history — reasons that seemed so compelling at the time — look foolish, wrong, or often naïve to later generations. Perhaps you have asked yourself similar questions: Why do people become so attached to political parties and habits of thought that they even vote against their own self-interest and cherished beliefs? Why do so many people have a clearer idea of what they are against that what they are for? You might wonder why, in politics, we call people “strong” simply because they never change their mind. You wonder why the same story line of good guys and bad guys is the narrative of most movies, novels, operas, and theater. You wonder why people who hate religion tend to attack it with the same dogmatism that they hate in religion. If you’ve ever wondered about questions like these, I invite you to sit with your “wonder.” Instead of letting your disbelief harden into skepticism or negativity, let yourself wonder — feel awe in the presence of — these insights into the way all of us think. What does this duality teach us about the human condition? What can it teach you about yourself?
