Friday, November 6, 2020

The Koan of Being Human

 

“Once there was a way to get back homewards.
 Once there was a way to get back home.
Sleepy darling, do not cry and I will sing you a lullaby.
Boy, you’re going to carry that weight , carry that weight a long time!”
The Beatles

Oh you children of Adam, what are you becoming?

Who can define or understand you, your madness, your genius, your implacable contradictions? So puny, yet, so powerful, so beautiful and yet, so ugly, so insignificant, and yet, so dangerous; angel or demon, sinner or saint, who are you really??

Are you diligently struggling to work through  the mountains of karma you inherited? Or are you too busy sowing the seeds of your own extinction?

Are you stardust, are you golden? Or are you a blight of locusts destroying all before you? 

Your creator  became you and  got lost  in his own illusion; now he turns inside-out in endless aplomb, surprising himself with himself. And you, where are you in all this noise? 

Who, or what,  exactly, is a human being?

Unruly, uncontrollable, you have proved yourself both  creative and destructive, so divine and, at the same time, so monstrous,  capable of both the greatest achievements and the most terrible crimes.

Have you evolved at all in fifty thousand years? Or are you secretly playing a complex game, riding a souped-up roller coaster of recurring lifetimes to see it all, feel it all, do it all?

End it all?

A thousand years from now, a hundred thousand years from now, will you still flaunt your genes on some distant planet in a galaxy far, far away? Or will the only remaining traces of you be some faintly human dust?

O child of man, who do you truly chose to be?


“ I live fearlessly from day to day until day no longer dawns for me.” Zen Master Ryokan.

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