Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Have a Safe Trip

“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting." ~Buddha (or so it's said)

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

An excluded middle - going the wrong way.

klaus s said...

a vehicle and map is also helpful.

Anonymous said...

Hi Don,you know what...maybe even going the 'wrong way' is ok as well...because when you go the wrong way...and see the impact on your life maybe thats when you choose the right way!!

I am in business and one of the things that I tell my clients is 'any action is better than no action'...

It's not always true of course...sometimes reflection is the best thing but even that is an action.

There is a great movie about getting in touch with your purpose at www.wheeloflife.tv

The trailer poses the confronting question 'what if everything you believed was 'wrong'.'

That is an interesting question about the whole concept of right and wrong...at one level who knows, and do these concepts even exist???

Just some thoughts :)

Anonymous said...

John,

Right and wrong do seem to be relative.

And taking the wrong path is useful, as a learning experience.

I don't quite believe that it's possible that everything someone knows could be wrong. I don't think that person would live very long.

raymond said...

Hi John Anderson

"That is an interesting question about the whole concept of right and wrong...at one level who knows, and do these concepts even exist???"

Not knowing the answer to this is the very basis of ancient daoist spirituality. These sages found no warrant for making fundamental judgments and discovered that this enabled them to embrace all beings and all of being. That embrace is expressed in the Chinese character rong. (you can see this one at http://www.afpc.asso.fr/wengu/wg/zhendic.php?zw=&q=%AEe&as=b5

ciao,
Raymond

Sophia said...

Don,

Well, at least they started!

Sophia said...

Klaus,

The vehicle - my body. The map - the teacher or texts. Although I guess texts are teachers, too.

Sophia said...

The things we believe just are. To call them right or wrong is to color them with human subjectivity.

Sophia said...

Here is a clipping from a Meher Baba book. (The Baba is one of my heroes.)

"FREEDOM FROM OPPOSITES
Every man is subject to agreeable and disagreeable exper-iences—of pleasure and pain, success and failure, good and evil, wealth and poverty, power and helplessness, honor and dishonor, gain and loss, fulfillment and frustration.
Each of these opposites invites a suitable response in emotion or in action. Mind is moved by these opposites, and is continually losing its equilibrium and continually trying to restore it
while constantly meeting the impacts of environmental changes.
During its various lives as a human being the ego-mind can oscillate endlessly between opposites, viz, indulgence and repression, secularism and religion, superiority complex and inferiority complex, self-aggrandizement and self-humiliation, introversion and extroversion, virtue and vice, pain and pleasure, "I" and "you" or "mine" and "thine," without arriving at true poise—attainable only through right understanding of the Truth. The oscillation of the ego-mind through the opposites is reactionary; therefore, though it passes through extremes it can not arrive at true poise.
True poise comes when the ego-mind, with all its accumulated inclinations, melts away through divine love, thus unveiling the supramental Truth in which there is the realization that one is—oneself—one with all life. Here there is no duality or division of life and therefore the soul is free from the opposite attitudes.
Having become one with the eternal and infinite divinity which sustains from within, the soul gains unending bliss, understanding, love and power, for the soul is free from duality."

Anonymous said...

It is especially difficult to not see Baba's teaching as "good".

Just yesterday I learned to call the devil my friend and it was suprisingly useful.

I do not mean to say that I wish to submit to the devil. It is just that seeing him as "bad" makes him invisible. And so the devil and I have become a friendly opponents in a kind of chess game.

Sophia said...

Hi Moss,

We strengthen ourselves and our energies, I think, when we give our opponents less power over us by sending them love.