Sometimes an afternoon's heavy
glare and dry heat gets to you and you just have to lie down. However, you
never nap for long. By early afternoon the wind has grown beyond being just a
friendly, cooling breeze. Always, just as you are about to doze off, it blows
over a potted plant, a heavy wooden window-shutter comes undone and crashes
against a wall, or a gust simply blows through the room so rudely that you have
to get up and look around.
On such drowsy afternoons when the
wind keeps you awake, you feel that the whole rest of the world must be quietly
at siesta, somehow more at ease with the wind than you. You look around, the
palm trees gyrate, dust swirls through the bougainvillea gate, iguanas keep
their heads low atop the ruin walls, and you think, think, think...
This week on such afternoons I've
been thinking about an insight that has grown in me over the years. Of course I
can't be sure that I'm seeing things clearly. I only know that the insight
feels harmonious with how I perceive Nature to be. Certainly I'm not the first
to come up with the thought. However, I did come to it in my own way. I feel a
responsibility to share the insight, for it provides a possible answer to a
kind of question I have heard many ask in desperation. Here is one form of that
question:
"Why do innocent, beautiful
people suffer and die, sometimes horribly?"
The insight is very simple, yet it
is based on an assumption not very popular or understandable in our culture. In
fact, the assumption is almost the opposite of what our culture imagines. Here
it is:
When a human or any living thing is
born, it is not a matter of something unique arising from nothingness. Rather,
everything is one to begin with, just that now there's another ephemeral
opaqueness or maybe a tiny hole in the Great Unity's fabric. From the Unity's
perspective, this opaqueness or hole is characterized by its lack of
information, its lack of understanding, and it lack of senses arrayed so that
the fabric and design of The Whole can be perceived, understood, and loved.
Why does the Universal Creative
Force bother causing uninformed, clumsily equipped beings to arise and evolve?
I think it may be so that the
Universal Creative Force can examine and know Herself by way of what we living
things see and feel. We are not only words She uses in Her poetry, tones in Her
music, but also we are nerve endings with which She experiences Her own being
and Her own evolution. We must be made simple and crude, and made so that we must
die before we understand much, else the opium of enlightenment would blunt our
pains and end our fears, and the Universal Creative Force's nervous system
would be anesthetized.