The first is from Wayne Dyer's book Inspiration: Your Ultimate Calling. In the Introduction, Dyer quotes a tale as told by Anthony de Mello.
The devotee knelt to be initiated into discipleship. The guru whispered the secret mantra into his ear, warning him not to reveal it to anyone.
"What will happen if I do?" asked the devotee.
Said the guru, "Anyone you reveal the mantra to will be liberated from the bondage of ignorance and suffering, but you yourself will be excluded from discipleship and suffer damnation."
No sooner had he heard these words than the devotee rushed to the marketplace, collected a large crowd around him, and repeated the sacred mantra for all to hear.
The disciples later reported this to the guru and demanded that the man be expelled from the monastery for his disobedience.
The guru smiled and said, "He has no need of anything I can teach. His action has shown him to be a guru in his own right."
This disciple is the epitome of someone who knows to the core of his heart exactly what he wants to accomplish with his life. There is no question, and once he had the tools, once the guru had given him the tools, he ran as fast as he could to put them to use. This could be the same disciple that couldn't kill his chicken, although i don't know that for a fact. I am so jealous of this certainty.
But what about the rest of us — those that haven't yet found the tools we need? While sitting here thinking about that, Ranier Maria Rilke came to mind. In his Letters To A Young Poet, we see that he tells a seeker that came to him:
... have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. ... train your[self] for [future possibilities] — but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don’t hate anything.
There have been, are, and will be days that seem to have been written in a foreign language, that seem impossible to decipher, that seem so incomprehensible as to make you wonder if it was really meant for someone else living in a far off land. There will also be days when you think you found your tool, and then, all of the sudden, someone or something jumps out and snatches it out of your life, saying no more than "that's not yours!"
When those occasions occur, the only thing i can think of doing is to follow Rilke's advice and patiently sit with the confusion. Sit with it and watch the sun rise early in the morning. Sit patiently with it and watch the sun set in the evening. Wrap your arms around it like a lover and caress it, showing your willingness to accept the uncertainty and confusion unconditionally.
But, i think Rilke is right — even more important than this is the admonition to live, live everything, live completely. Don't live only the good, the beneficial, the understandable. Live the bad days, the hurtful, and the detrimental as well. Live the completely unintelligible encounters as well. Especially those. Don't hate anything. Live those encounters and circumstances that seem to be encoded in a completely unreadable script as if your future depended on it. Don't just accept them, live them to the utmost.
If you do this, someday, somehow, somewhere, someone will show up with the key to unlock the code and you will understand.
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