Friday, May 06, 2005

Infantile Grasping

Eknath Easwaran writes today about how many of us are like a baby who doesn’t know how to let go of the rattle in his hand in order to take hold of a toothbrush. You can see the baby wanting to grab the toothbrush, but he hasn’t yet developed to the stage of figuring out that he has to drop the rattle before he can take something new into his hand. And so he just sits there looking flustered.

Many of us who want to rise to a higher level of spiritual realization hold on to our old ways of seeing and living in the world because, like the baby, we haven’t yet matured to the point of figuring out that we can’t acquire the new and better until we discard the old. But, Easwaran assures us, the day may well come when we will want something bad enough and see what we have to do to get it, and, in renouncing the old, open ourselves to a new life.

I am like the frustrated baby still grasping his rattle while Alan Watts, Thich Nhat Hanh, Eknath Easwaran, and Ken Wilber dangle priceless treasures before me.

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