Dear W,

The Eastern teaching, I feel, asks one to hold onto two proposals. One is that life–all of life–is poignantly, achingly precious. 

Life can turn on a “knife’s edge,” on a single diagnosis, and any tuned-in person damn well knows this. Fobbing off the knife’s edge of life is a shitty dodge, a turning away, a refusal to accept the aching and bloodied poignancy of life. You must feel that you would, in a heartbeat, die for her so that she might live.

The other proposal would have it that what we really are–if you will countenance this–is unborn and thus deathless. The Bhagavad Gita is just one sacred text that makes this plain as day–at least intellectually speaking. The experiential realization is, of course, the thing.

Now, the great Atmananda, who was fully realized in the Eastern sense, wept for his dead wife for many, many days. Disciples said that he was inconsolable, so deep was his love for his wife. And yet, he also knew that Spirit is changeless, unconditioned, uncaused, and unstained. He knew that he and she and you and I are THAT. 

We need both. Denying both, you live a life of terrible and terrific coldness, of checked-out-ness. You are inert. Yet the first, alone, would crush any Italian grandmother weeping over the body of her dead grandchild. The second, alone, would lose the power of manifestation, of life breathing fecund with life, of the flash and flutter of living. Of course, the plot twist is that the two proposals are, really, one: the Self is either an apparent manifestation (Vedanta) or a real manifestation (Kashmir Shaivism) of Itself, but either way it’s the Self through and through.

Together, if I may say, we find, nondually speaking, Christ on the cross: bloodied and broken yet also and at once redeemed in and by the Love that he is.

Warmly,

Andrew