CleansingTheDoorsOfPerception

► “The Lord’s Prayer is only 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking God not to lead us into temptation.  The 1 sided contemplative leaves undone many things that he ought to do; but to make up for it, he refrains from doing a host of things he ought not to do.  The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.  The contemplative (the person) whose perception has been cleansed does not have to stay in his room.  He can go about his business, so completely satisfied to see and be a part of the divine Order of Things that he will never even be tempted to indulge in what Traherne called the ‘dirty devices of the world’.  When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when the sea flows in our veins…and the stars are our jewels, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?  Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor.  And to these enormous negative virtues we may add another which, though hard to define, is both positive and important.  The quietist may not practice contemplation in its fullness; but if they practice it at all, they may bring back enlightening reports of another, a transcendent country of the mind; and if they practice it in the height, they will become conduits through which some beneficent influence can flow out of that other country into a world of darkened selves, chronically dying for the lack of it.”      

 ~ AldousHuxley.TheDoorsOfPerception.1954

►► “ Today the precept had swallowed up the concept. ”

 ~ AldousHuxley.TheDoorsOfPerception.1954

►►►“What is the Dharma-Body* of the Buddha?”  The question asked in  

               a Zen Monastery by an earnest & bewildered novice. 

              Promptly, the Zen Master replies, “The hedge at the bottom of the 

              garden.” 

              The novice then asks, “And the Man that realizes this truth, what is

              he?”

             “A golden-haired Lion,” the Master replies.

* The “Dharma-Body” refers to the Mind or Philosophy or Suchness or the conceptual underpinnings of…