Your problem is that you confuse the world with what people do. The things people do are the shields against the forces that surround us; what we do as people gives us comfort and makes us feel safe; what people do is rightfully very important, but only as a shield. We never learn that the things we do as people are only shields and we let them dominate and topple our lives. In fact I could say that for mankind, what people do is greater and more important than the world itself.
The world is all that is encased here; life, death, people, the allies, and everything else that surrounds us. The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Nothing is pending in the world, nothing is finished, yet nothing is unresolved. The world is unfathomable. And so are we, and so is every being that exists in this world. Thus we must treat it as it is, a sheer mystery!
An average man doesn't do this, though. The world is never a mystery for him, and when he arrives at old age he is convinced he has nothing more to live for. An old man has not exhausted the world. He has exhausted only what people do. But in his stupid confusion he believes that the world has no more mysteries for him. What a wretched price to pay for our shields!
A warrior is aware of this confusion and learns to treat things properly. The things that people do cannot under any conditions be more important than the world. And thus a warrior treats the world as an endless mystery and what people do as an endless folly.
We are dealing with that immensity out there. To turn that magnificence out there into reasonableness doesn't do anything for you. Here, surrounding us, is eternity itself. To engage in reducing it to a manageable nonsense is petty and outright disastrous. It is stupid for you to scorn the mysteries of the world simply because you know the doing of scorn. I've told you, this is a weird world. The forces that guide men are unpredictable, awesome, yet their splendour is something to witness. Call them forces, spirits, airs, winds, or anything like that.
The world is indeed full of frightening things and we are helpless creatures surrounded by forces that are inexplicable and unbending. The average man, in ignorance, believes that those forces can be explained or changed; he doesn't really know how to do that, but he expects that the actions of mankind will explain them or change them sooner or later.
A sorcerer, on the other hand, does not think of explaining or changing them; instead, he learns to use such forces by redirecting himself and adapting to their direction. That's his trick. There is very little to sorcery once you find out its trick. A sorcerer, by opening himself to knowledge, falls prey to those forces and has only one means of balancing himself, his will; thus he must feel and act like a warrior. I will repeat this once more: Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge. What helps a sorcerer live a better life is the strength of being a warrior.
It is my commitment to teach you to see. I am compelled, therefore, to teach you to feel and act like a warrior. To see without first being a warrior would make you weak; it would give you a false meekness, a desire to retreat; your body would decay because you would become indifferent. It is my personal commitment to make you a warrior so you won't crumble.
A warrior selects the items that make his world. He selects deliberately, for every item he chooses is a shield that protects him from the onslaughts of the forces he is striving to use. The average man who is equally surrounded by those inexplicable forces is oblivious to them because he has other kinds of special shields to protect himself.
People are busy doing that which people do. Those are their shields. Whenever a sorcerer has an encounter with any of those inexplicable and unbending forces we will talk about, his gap opens, making him more susceptible to his death than he ordinarily is. We die through that gap, therefore if it is open one should have his will ready to fill it; that is, if one is a warrior. If one is not a warrior, like yourself, then one has no other recourse but to use the activities of daily life to take one's mind away from the fright of the encounter and thus to allow one's gap to close.
Act like a warrior and select the items of your world. You cannot surround yourself with things helter-skelter any longer. I tell you this in a most serious vein. A warrior encounters those inexplicable and unbending forces because he is deliberately seeking them, thus he is always prepared for the encounter. The first thing you must do, then, is be prepared. A warrior takes the responsibility of protecting his life. Then if any of those forces tap him and open his gap, he must deliberately strive to close it by himself. For that purpose he must have a selected number of things that give him great peace and pleasure, things which he can deliberately use to take his thoughts from his fright and close his gap and make him solid.
In his day-to-day life a warrior chooses to follow the path with heart. It is the consistent choice of the path with heart which makes a warrior different from the average man. He knows that a path has heart when he is one with it, when he experiences a great peace and pleasure traversing its length. The things a warrior selects to make his shields are the items of a path with heart. You must surround yourself with the items of a path with heart and you must refuse the rest.
There are a series of truths about awareness that have been arranged in a specific sequence for purposes of comprehension. The mastery of awareness consists in internalizing the total sequence of such truths.The first truth is that our familiarity with the world we perceive compels us to believe that we are surrounded by objects, existing by themselves and as themselves, just as we perceive them, whereas, in fact, there is no world of objects, but a universe of the Indescribable force's emanations. Before I can explain the Indescribable force's emanations, I have to talk about the known, the unknown, and the unknowable.
The unknown is something that is veiled from man, shrouded perhaps by a terrifying context, but which, nonetheless, is within man's reach. The unknown becomes the known at a given time. The unknowable, on the other hand, is the indescribable, the unthinkable, the unrealizable. It is something that will never be known to us, and yet it is there, dazzling and at the same time horrifying in its vastness.
There is a simple rule of thumb: in the face of the unknown, man is adventurous. It is a quality of the unknown to give us a sense of hope and happiness. Man feels robust, exhilarated. Even the apprehension that it arouses is very fulfilling. The new seers saw that man is at his best in the face of the unknown. The unknown and the known are really on the same footing, because both are within the reach of human perception. Seers, can leave the known at a given moment and enter into the unknown.
Whatever is beyond our capacity to perceive is the unknowable. And the distinction between it and the knowable is crucial. Confusing the two would put seers in a most precarious position whenever they are confronted with the unknowable. Most of what's out there is beyond our comprehension. The first truth about awareness is that the world out there is not really as we think it is. We think it is a world of objects and it's not.
You say you agree with me because everything could be reduced to being a field of energy. But you are merely intuiting a truth. To reason it out is not to verify it. I am not interested in your agreement or disagreement, but in your attempt to comprehend what is involved in this truth. You cannot witness fields of energy; not as an average man, that is. Now, if you were able to see them, you would be a seer, in which case you would be explaining the truths about awareness.
Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives. Hence, the countless examples of people who have the clearest convictions and yet act diametrically against them time and time again; and have as the only explanation for their behavior the idea that to err is human.
The first truth is that the world is as it looks and yet it isn't. It's not as solid and real as our perception has been led to believe, but it isn't a mirage either. The world is not an illusion, as it has been said to be; it's real on the one hand, and unreal on the other. Pay close attention to this, for it must be understood, not just accepted. We perceive. This is a hard fact. But what we perceive is not a fact of the same kind, because we learn what to perceive.
Something out there is affecting our senses. This is the part that is real. The unreal part is what our senses tell us is there. Take a mountain, for instance. Our senses tell us that it is an object. It has size, colour, form. We even have categories of mountains, and they are downright accurate. Nothing wrong with that; the flaw is simply that it has never occurred to us that our senses play only a superficial role. Our senses perceive the way they do because a specific feature of our awareness forces them to do so.
I've used the term "the world" to mean everything that surrounds us. I have a better term, of course, but it would be quite incomprehensible to you. Seers say that we think there is a world of objects out there only because of our awareness. But what's really out there are the Indescribable force's emanations, fluid, forever in motion, and yet unchanged, eternal.
| Prev: "Seeing" | Table of Contents | Next: The Way of the Warrior |
