The Beginning and The End Do your duty and live well--hard to understand yet easy to do. Live with your duty and do well--easy to understand yet hard to do. We are often presented with this conundrum. The search of a whole lifetime comes down to what is right, but what is right changes infinitely over a lifetime. When I finish my day, sometimes there is a noble aspect that looms over what I have done, giving me a confidence to carry on in my endeavors, then at other times everything seems worthless, things happen and I am just a part of some growing confusion. 'The rain, Once the light has restored Its nature to the leaves, Forgets the joy of its burden To leave the rest of us in peace...' (Excerpt from Day-Keepers published in The Uninitiated ) Light and dark, rain and sun, good and bad, the extremes of everything that is imaginable take place here on this earth; their consequences, their moral aspect, take place in us; we are at once a part of the earth and of th
Doing and Non-Doing We are always making plans, always finding reasons to do things, or not to do things. The mind knows the way, but it is in distinguishing the way that we go wrong. Our nature has been to live up to ideals, to live up to goals, but there in the midst of our striving the ideal and the goal are indistinguishable from the unacceptable and the aimless. As diverse as we consider ourselves to be, the real problem lies in the monotony of our diversity. Most of it is only an admission of an ongoing trend, and the rest is a demand to be like others already there. You can only go as far as sanity allows, but sanity heeds no excess when pursuing what is allowable. In living up to your dreams there is the presupposition that you want to bring the world down to your understanding; thus, what we allow always inclines to the ideal. Like it or not, we can never admit to anyone that we are doing nothing, and what we do admit of doing is always more than what is done. To s