Let there be pain, let there be suffering. Go through the dark night, and you will reach to a beautiful sunrise. It is only in the womb of the dark night that the sun evolves. It is only through the dark night that the morning comes. - OshoKonnichiwa followers!
If any of you would like to read the personal journal of my experience in Japan over the next few weeks, message me and I’d be glad to give you the URL and password.
Hope you are all doing well, Namaste!
Tony
Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryoken sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon.”
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If you have time to chatter,
Read books.
If you have time to read,
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean.
If you have time to walk,
Sing songs and dance.
If you have time to dance,
Sit quietly, you happy, lucky idiot.
As I sit here, witnessing a sorrow that hasn’t crossed my chest in what feels like a lifetime, I think of where that youthful susceptibility has gone. For when I was under the influence of innocence, my ego, my subjectivity, ruled the mind with an inescapable iron-fist; there would be pangs of jealousy, anger, and pain as consistent as the passing of citizens through a metropolitan subway. And oh, how I identified with those people. In each unique ethnicity, those passing individuals were myself reflected back in demonic, distorted ways. The jealousy, the anger, the pain were palpable; they were organisms I could reach out and touch, and there was no escaping them.
Yet, now in the light of a new day, it’s as if I’ve moved continents; from the underground mess of New York to the cleanly, organized Shinkansen. The people are still there (perhaps even more), but they simply bow and pass on. Every once and a while there will be a rude tourist that doesn’t know how to act, but a simple lecture on chowa sends them off perplexed and slightly more considerate.
It’s an unnerving irony whereby acknowledging that there is no controlling the traffic, entails a hybrid control of it. Such a hybrid may not give the authority to eliminate certain thoughts and emotions, but it does filter the subjective associations that once plagued an underdeveloped Limbic system.
So I know sorrow is there, and perhaps it isn’t simply a passing bird, but like a chronic shadow that devours the light, there is no harm that comes from it. It is but an armed guard at the station keeping us mindful.
