Both of us laughing.
“My old landlady got rich a couple years ago. Used to be poorer than me. Now she laughs that I don’t have money. She laughs that I’ve fallen behind. I laugh that she’s gotten ahead. Both of us laughing, no stopping us. Lady of the Land, and the Lord of the West” Han Shan
From a certain point of view - we are presented with an enigma. What’s so funny about getting ahead in life? And what could possibly be funny about falling behind?
Han Shan sees through relativity. Success and achievement are culturally defined. These days they involve a high salary, one of a handful of respectable professions, owning a car, and so on. Yet, a few centuries earlier success looked entirely different. A few millennia earlier it was even different! The human being has been coming to Earth to do a lot more than succeed in a relative cultural sense. Our birthright is much deeper than finding the right career. Why have we come to this planet? Why have we taken a human incarnation?
“If one imagines that a saw is a hammer - one will not merely fail to drive nails into wood; one will damage the saw” Khandro Dechen
If you think that life is about getting ahead - you will injure both yourself and others. Getting ahead has meant different things to different people in different times across different spaces. What about getting in touch? Getting in touch with what all people, in all times, across all spaces, have in common? That feeling of awe and confusion, of wonder and vulnerability. The feeling that A.E. Housman aptly writes about, putting words to the experience of being a “stranger and afraid, in a world I never made”.
We all took this human birth for a reason - we just need to remember why.
“It's all about love. Making someone else's existence just a little easier... nothing else matters. I know this now” -Terence McKenna
It’s about making sure we’re all okay. And helping when we can, and resting when we need. Children do this spontaneously. Today I observed one child, alone and all muddy in the playground, bewildered and unsure of what to do next. Another child ran up to them and simply said “Play with me” - they both took off running. Both of them laughing.
As adults this looks a little different, a little more nuanced, a little more culturally refined - but all we really want is to play with each other. It’s not about creating monuments after ourselves, nor is it about making our way to the top of some culturally relative hierarchy. It’s about sharing, teaching, and loving. And maybe this takes you to the top of the pyramid - or maybe it takes you somewhere else. Where we end up is not entirely up to us, we go where we are needed.
I often thought that material success was at odds with spiritual progression - that if you engage with the world, with culture, that you can and will utterly lose yourself. Now, I think that this view gives too much power to culture, implying that it has the ability to veil our true nature. Perhaps it can obscure it temporarily - but as the clouds move through the sky, the sun’s true radiance is always untouched.
What we are shines forth regardless of our century of birth, and our task, if we wish not to live in a Himalayan hermitage, is to integrate into the world and express our timeless purpose in the here and now. But we need not do it alone.
“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” Albert Camus
As we walk where we ought to go - from our dawn unto our dusk - let us find friends to laugh with along the way. Even the Buddha writes on the importance of friendship.
“It may be understood how the entire spiritual life is good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship” The Buddha in SN 45.2
The entire spiritual path is connected with the here and now, with people from this century, with the ideas from this culture, with the hierarchies from this evolutionary stage. The salient point is this: don’t get caught up in relativity and don’t ignore it either. Don’t only become Lady of the Land, make sure you become Lord of the West as well.
It is as it is.
Sasha