Killing Chickens In The Dark

Mary Oliver gave a short but breathtaking lecture on life in one of her poems from the collection called Thirst:

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
A box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
That this, too, was a gift.

Sometimes the most obvious of facts can take a lifetime to see, as Mary points out in her poem. The difficulty isn't that the signs aren't there, it's simply that we don't have the eyes to see them. Yes, yes, of course we have the physical equipment needed to see — the eyeballs stuck in our head at the front of our skulls. What's lacking, and what causes us all our problems, is what those eyeballs connect to, and what we use to process, filter, and edit the information we take in.

I don't remember it perfectly because i read it several decades ago, but James Michener had a great line in his novel Space that went something like: "An age isn't called Dark because the light didn't shine, but because people refused to see." Or something like that. This points to the same thing; it's not that you can't see what is right in front of you, but that you don't see what's right in front of you.

Learning to see what is really there takes a new set of eyes, a set of eyes that most people don't take the time to develop. It is with these new eyes that you see reality, that you see life without your presuppositions, without your beliefs, without your ideologies, without your religions, without your assumptions, without your conjectures, and on and on.

Learning to see life with these new eyes is very, very, difficult. But, oh, the wonders it brings into view makes every minute you invest in developing them worthwhile.

I heard an old Sufi story that epitomizes the new world view that you live in once you develop these new eyes and accustom yourself to using them. An old and wise Sufi priest called two of his disciples to him one day and gave each of them a chicken, telling them to go kill the chicken where no one else would see. The first disciple turned and walked behind a fence, and after a few flapping of wings and a little noise the chicken was dead. The second disciple left and wandered around for several days before finally coming back to the priest with the still very much alive chicken in his arms. You didn't kill the chicken? asked the priest? I couldn't, replied the disciple. No matter where i went, the chicken could still see.

I can close my eyes and see the smile slowly creep across the priest's face after hearing that. There is still hope, he probably whispered to himself. With those new eyes, it's not just 'me' and 'everything else out there.' It's us. It's all of humanity. It's all sentient beings, chickens included. It's the universe, the cosmos. With effort, you can stretch your sense of who you are to include everything else. It is possible.

Robert Thurman wrote a marvelous paragraph in his Forward to a recent English translation of the Tibetan book Lamrim Chenmo, or The Great Treatise on the Stages of The Path To Enlightenment.

[The Lamrim Chenmo] "presents a stunning vision of the timeless origin and infinite permutations of all life forms, locating the precious jewel of an individual human embodiment at a critical moment of personal evolution. It provides this revelation in such a way that individual readers can be moved to achieve a fundamental paradigm shift in their vision of their lives: from having been a self-centered, this-life-oriented personal agent struggling with the currents and obstacles around them, anxiously seeking some security and happiness before hopefully finding peaceful obliteration in death; to becoming a magnificent awakening being soaring out of an infinite past experience in marvelous evolutionary flight toward an unimaginably beautiful destiny of wisdom, love, and bliss — Buddhahood, or simply the supreme evolutionary glory attainable by any conscious being."

A fundamental paradigm shift in your vision of who and what you are? Of who and what we are? Of who and what are? How may of us can truly say that they want to make that paradigm shift? How many of us can honestly say that they hope to become "a magnificent awakening being soaring ... toward an unimaginably beautiful destiny of wisdom, love, and bliss?" If this book can really move you to wanting that, it's amazing that everyone who reads this doesn't immediately run out and buy a copy.

If you do want to wander in that direction, though, begin your journey there by doing your stretching exercises every day. Day after day after day, stretch your concept of who you are so that it includes more and more of what previously you labeled 'out there.' Also, notice, as Mary did, that even darkness can be a gift. And notice that with your new eyes, you can see a lot in that darkness.