CHESTERTON ONCE SAID THAT, BECAUSE THEY take themselves lightly, angels can fly.

Dualism appears the moment we make an assertion or a denial about anything; as soon as we think that This is That or This is not That we have the distinction between This and That. And even when we say that in Reality there are no distinctions, we have the opposition of Reality and distinctions.

Nothing is easier than to give up the world because one is incompetent in the affairs of the world. There is no wisdom in scorning riches simply because one is unable to obtain them, nor in despising the pleasures of the senses because one has not the means of fulfilling them. If the desire for these things exists, and if that desire is thwarted by

I am thinking, rather, of the old Buddhist metaphor of the doctrine which is like a raft for crossing a river. When you have reached the opposite shore, you do not carry the raft on your back, but leave it behind.

Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain.

Yet, paradoxically, this detachment from is also a harmony with, for the man who goes into the forest without disturbing a blade of grass is a man in no conflict with nature. Like the Native American scouts, he walks without a single twig cracking beneath his feet. Like the Japanese architects, he builds a house which seems to be a part of its

He is enlightened who joins in this play knowing it as play, for man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. Thus man only becomes man when he loses the gods’ sense of levity.

Thus one of the more sickening aspects of spiritual phoniness is the usually rather subtly hinted implication that one has, after all, “suffered so much.”

“He that loseth his soul shall find it.”