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keep your eye on the spiritual vision ahead; you must be willing to have new responses every day. Most
of all, you share a path that leads, step by step, out of unreality.
The ultimate goal, if you really want to be real, is to experience existence itself. I am is such an
experience. It is both common and rare because everyone knows how to be, yet few people extract the
full promise of their own being. I am gets lost when you start identifying instead with I do this, I own
that, I like A but not B. These identifications become more important than the reality of your own pure
being.
So let s go deeper into the link between suffering and unreality. The way we forget the peace and clarity
of I am can be broken down into five aspects. In Sanskrit these are called thefive kleshas, the root
causes of every form of suffering.
1. Not knowing what is real
2. Grasping and clinging to the unreal
3. Being afraid of the unreal and recoiling from it
4. Identifying with an imaginary self
5. Fear of death
Right now you and I are doing one of these five things, although we began so long ago that now the
process is ingrained. The five kleshas are arranged in a cascade. Once you stop knowing what is real
(first klesha), the others fall into place automatically. This means that for most people only the end of the
line fear of death is a conscious experience; therefore, we must begin there and go back up the
ladder.
Being afraid of death is a source of anxiety that reaches into many areas. The way our society worships
youth and shuns the elderly, our desperate need for distraction, the promotion of cosmetics and beauty
treatments, flourishing gyms with full-length mirrors on all sides, and the craze for celebrity are all
symptoms of wanting to deny death. Theology tries to convince us that there is life after death, but since
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that claim has to be taken on faith, religion exacts obedience by holding the afterlife over our heads. If we
lack faith, if we worship the wrong God or sin against the right God, our chances for a reward after we
die are ruined. Religious wars continue to erupt over this issue, which is so anxiety-provoking that
fanatics would rather die for the faith than live with the admission that someone else s faith has a right to
exist. I die so that you may not believe in your God is the most twisted legacy of the fifth klesha.
A person fears death not for itself but for a deeper reason, which is the need to defend an imaginary self.
Identifying with an imaginary self is the fourth klesha, and it s something we all do. Even on a superficial
level, people erect an image based on income and status. When Francis of Assisi, the son of a wealthy
silk merchant, stripped off his rich garments and renounced his father s money, he was throwing away not
just his worldly possessions but also his identity the way people knew who he was. In his mind, God
could not be approached through a false self-image.
Self-image is closely connected to self-esteem, and we know the high cost a person pays when
self-esteem is lost. Children who sit in the back row in grade school and avoid the teacher s eye usually
don t grow up to discuss foreign policy or medieval art because, early on, their self-image incorporated a
sense of inadequacy. Conversely, studies have shown that if a teacher is told that a particular student is
exceptionally bright, that student will perform much better in class even if the selection was random: Low
IQ kids can achieve beyond high IQ kids with enough approval from their teachers. The image set in the
teacher s mind is enough to turn a poor performer into a sterling one.
Identifying with a false image of who you are causes a great deal of suffering in other ways. Life never
stops demanding more and more. The demands on our time, patience, ability, and emotions can become
so overwhelming that admitting your inadequacy seems like the honest thing to do. Yet in a person s false
self-image is buried the ugly history of everything that has gone wrong. I won t, I can t, and I give
up all flow from the fourth klesha.
The third klesha says that even with a healthy self-image we recoil from things that threaten our egos.
These threats exist everywhere. I am afraid of being poor, of losing my spouse, of breaking the law. I am
afraid to shame myself before anyone whose respect I want to keep. For some people, the thought of
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