When you think about the teachers who gave you something valuable, some were kind and some were fierce. There were those who took something away and those who opened a door to something new, those who showed you your strength and those who showed you your weakness. If we really want truth, we cannot demand that all teachings be comfortable or easy.
There are many stages of growth and transformation. The seed needs something different from the newly emerged seedling, then comes the sapling, and then all the various points on the way to fully realized maturity. The wind and storm in which a tree becomes strong can kill a tiny plant; the total darkness a seed requires can kill a full-grown tree.
I remember a fierce, demanding teacher who taught martial arts of all types, based on totally different philosophies. Some were soft, internal arts, based on feeling and directing internal energies; some were hard, external arts based on outer strength and releasing external power. When someone asked him how he could teach these totally opposite, totally contradictory approaches – one inner, one outer – his answer was that at the beginning they are opposite, but as you move toward the end point the hard takes on qualities of the soft, the soft incorporates the hard, and at the end they become one. At that time I wasn’t ready for his fierce approach, but his teaching stayed with me.
Life is inclusive of everything, total, organic, not just one single way. We try to find a formula to follow, a set way to be, someone or something to model ourselves after. And we look toward the outer world for answers. There are stages where this is helpful, and the question of what kind of person we want to be is a vital one. But in the process of growth and maturation the time comes when another vital question rises up within us, Where is the real me? What am I underneath it all, not a role, not the structure of personality, not the conditioning imposed on me? Who am I really? What is authentic, what is absolutely fundamental? At this stage we start looking toward the inner world, and a new stage begins.
There’s a famous story related to this, about the great Hasidic mystic Rabbi Zusya. On his deathbed his disciples asked him about going before God, and they praised his wisdom and compared him to the great teachers and prophets of their tradition. And Zusya replied, ‘When I stand before God, he will not ask me “Why were you not more like Moses?” He will ask me, “Why were you not more like Zusya?”’
To ask of ourselves that same essential question is to go deep underneath the rushing waters on the surface. It is a process of excavation, a voyage into the unknown depths of ourselves. It may not be comfortable, it may not be easy, but it is not our responsibility to be like anyone else, it is our responsibility to be who we really are.
© 2022 Shanti Natania Grace
Image: Underwater Archeologists in Papua, New Guinea, courtesy of Project Recover.
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Your job in this lifetime is to fully be you.
– Bodhisattva Shree Swami Premodaya
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Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
Translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
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To Know the Dark
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Wendell Berry
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