Life is somewhat like a cave which does open up suddenly sometimes. We come through an opening and perceive a larger space, greater light, a vision of the path in the distance. But we can only enter that cave one step at a time.
If there is perhaps one most ubiquitous and damaging fact about human thought and behavior patterns, it is the thought that we can skip steps, that outward forms are “more or less” the same as inner knowing, inner clarity, inner vision. That if we act in a certain way, say certain thinks (sic; I intended things, but thinks also works), discipline ourselves to think certain thoughts, and pretend we are feeling the way we conceive we ought to feel, that some progress has been made. Most of the time, this is actually regression, because the path forward has been foreclosed by a precipitous and fatal error.
This is Socialism, certainly–the Great Leap Forward in human well being–but it is also most other forms of religion, too. Socialism is simply taking the spirit of error we see in, for example, Christianity, and implementing it aggressively in the secular, god-but-not-obsession-free domain.
Socrates was wise in not allowing himself to be misunderstood. Everything he had to say, he said. What he could not say to an individual, in a specific context, he did not say. Nothing was written.
This is what I feel reading one of the foundational texts of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. No doubt there were hidden teachings too, but it is one size fits all. Small wonder that many Buddhists in all traditions found themselves reduced to reciting some of the foundational Sutras as mantras, which cannot have been the purpose at all.
The Sufis have a saying that when the student is ready, the teaching cannot be withheld, and when he or she is not ready, it cannot be given, by any means.
I do feel a kinship with their teaching method, as I understand it, which consists in stories which would have been in general tailored to specific groups and even individuals, which could only be understood as the result of real progress in perceptual acumen.
Now, it is of course interesting to speculate how much knowledge remains hidden, and with good reason. We in the West are mostly fucking imbeciles on all levels. We equate progress with increasing abstraction, increasing separation from the natural world, with the death of God and the gods, and with the amelioration of all negative physical conditions–hunger, thirst, cold, heat–which might cause people to inquire more deeply into the nature of life.
Can I perhaps stipulate that where no one is poor, everyone is stupid? This is certainly not quite true, and certainly not necessarily true, but I do think it has a tinge of truth in it.
I was standing in the wind the other day, watching some bushes move in breeze, and it occurred to me that there are no physical preconditions for a the spiritual path. I’m certainly not going to give my stuff away and become homeless, but it is a useful thought, I think.