Reaching

I know i quoted this section of the Dhammapada just the other day, but before going to bed i opened the book again to read just a few verses and when i opened it, these were the first words i saw.

"Hard it is to be born,
Hard it is to live,
Harder still to hear of the way,
And hard to rise, follow, and awake.

Yet the reaching is simple.

Do what is right.
Be pure.
At the end of the way is freedom.
Till then, patience."

I don't know why i find the last few lines so overwhelmingly poetic, but i do. I could say them over and over; they roll off the tongue like a sweet ballad.

Do what is right.
Be pure.
At the end of the way is freedom.
Till then, patience.

The Buddha says that the task at hand is hard, very hard, occasionally seeming impossibly hard. Forget the odds of just being born. Or the odds of being born in such a place, at such a time, with such a mental orientation...that you happen to hear of Buddhism...and that it happens to sound interesting enough that you listen...and that it sounds interesting enough that you look into it...and having looked into it, that you decide to aim for the ultimate prize. The odds against all of this are astronomical. And, if it happens, the work is HARD.

Yet, given all the difficulty, "the reaching is simple." The work is hard. It requires perseverance, faith, persistence, yes, even maybe some stubbornness. But, if you commit to putting in the time, "the reaching is simple." The reaching is simple. Simple.

All you have to do is, "Do what is right. Be pure." That's it. Do what is right, and be pure. And,

At the end of the way is freedom.
Till then, patience.

Till then, patience. You will reach. No, that's not the best way to say it. If 'you' reach, you missed it, because there is nowhere to go and no one to go there. That's another aspect of the difficult part of the journey. The other shore will appear. Not because you left 'this' shore and went 'there.' Not because you did anything special at any particular time and something happened. Freedom is not a state of mind, it is not a special mindset. It simply is. It simply IS. And one day, from out of the blue, you will simply realize that you are free, that the reaching has taking place.

Till then patience. Till then know that your work will pay off, it is just necessary to bide your time.