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Strange how, no matter how well-mortared and high, the barriers anyone may construct are bound to lose their effectiveness and savor. Yesterday's heart-felt opinion or conclusion is today's bit of dust. What protects and preserves also hems in and constricts. Gautama's father built his son a fine palace filled with luxuries. He wanted to protect his son. And what did the kid do? He left his protections behind, decimating, in effect, the walls and turrets intended to keep invaders at bay.
Today, the Egyptians permanently opened the Rafah border crossing into the Gaza Strip. With its borders closed, Gaza was suffocated economically and socially. Israel was happy to see a source of its sometimes-enemy curtailed, but the residents of Gaza were not. Today, a breach was created in long-standing walls.
And I don't imagine people are much different -- gathering up their beliefs and judgments and mortaring the walls of self. Castle after castle, wall after wall -- if this one doesn't work, maybe that one will...creating enemies, creating friends, defending against, asserting the truth ... on and on.
Without the walls, what would be left, who would I be?
Well, there is the present which, since no one can escape it anyway, is enough.
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Dear Sir,
ReplyDeleteAfter several extended periods of spiritual practice, today.. somehow like the Gautama Buddha mentioned, vanquished.. is the dunno dunno what... happy.. is the dunno dunno what.
like a castle, within the walls of buddhism.. out of nowhere, the taoists came and opened it up for me with their yin-yang doctrine..
haiz.
i imagined u had as many friends whom u had over for tea, who were christians, and catholics, are wlaled up in their own doctinres... and there and then, u, sir, went in and helped them open up their walls.. tada, this is zen, this is buddhism.. and they went like OMFG! This is what I have been looking for my whole life!
Not really better. Just.. a slight difference. And that slight difference, bullsh*ttish it may sound sometimes, meant everything to them --- blokes who are stuck and walled up within themselves.
arigato!
/\
lionel