The worldly per­son, liv­ing amid tran­si­ence, agrees with the first half of the sen­tence, and so tries to squeeze as much exper­i­en­cing, or pleas­ure, as pos­sible out of every moment. Live for today! – we only live once, so let us make the most of this little time… and yes, we try to avoid suf­fer­ing, yet again and again we stumble into it, and we try to fol­low the trail of joy, but it runs away from us all the same.

The spir­itu­al per­son agrees with the first half of the sen­tence only in the light of its second half. Then the say­ing lifts our life into anoth­er dimen­sion. Per­haps it lays a great­er respons­ib­il­ity upon us, for it reveals that in truth there is no idling, that in etern­al life there is no rest or hol­i­day, while at the same time per­haps we are given more time for everything. It eases the cramp of ‘now or never’, and so brings peace to our mind and heart, and what is more, the con­scious­ness of etern­al life reveals in a flash a pos­sib­il­ity that ought to be pondered with rev­er­ence. What can we do with the full­ness entrus­ted to us, with infin­ite time, enough even to carry out the plans we thought impossible? Is this not a turn­ing point in our think­ing? A brief sev­enty or eighty years gives little chance to trace a great arc, but in etern­al time even a long course can be con­ceived. The qual­ity of life is shaped at its root by the pic­ture we form of our hori­zons. If we sub­or­din­ate our deeds to short-term goals, only a small arc of life awaits us. What mat­ters is a long-term aim in life, one that may arch across sev­er­al lives, in which the short­er stages are sub­or­din­ate to the final goal and serve to bring it about. Who­ever has no final goal merely cre­ates his own anarchy in con­fused haste.

It is also true that the thought of one, yet etern­al life allows no self-decep­tion. It will not do to be very spir­itu­al people dur­ing our morn­ing med­it­a­tion and then to act all day long as ordin­ary self-seekers. It is not Sunday reli­gi­os­ity that we need, but abid­ing wis­dom, elev­ated aware­ness, inner puri­fic­a­tion. In the light of lived wis­dom, the exper­i­ences we gain of the world are trans­formed.

Once the three great eld­ers of the East met: Con­fucius, Buddha and Lao Tzu. They set about a joint inquiry, scru­tin­ising the con­tents of a vin­eg­ar jar. Mas­ter Kung, the real­ist, put his fin­ger into the jar, licked it, pursed his lips and said: This is sour! Next came the great pess­im­ist, Buddha, who like­wise dipped his fin­ger into the con­tents of the jar and declared: This is not sour, this is bit­ter! Last came Lao Tzu, the wise observ­er of nature, who also tasted the con­tents of the jar and, lick­ing his fin­ger, said: This is not sour, nor is it bit­ter, this is sweet!

In the name of quick and easy growth, much intel­lec­tu­al rub­bish is pro­claimed: ‘Love your­self, trust your­self!’ – but without real puri­fic­a­tion, sac­ri­fice and spir­itu­al work, this is utterly ground­less. An elev­ated, pur­i­fied state of con­scious­ness is needed if we are to trust ourselves, for then we shall see things as they really are. Also fash­ion­able nowadays is the idea that the things of life must be accep­ted as they are, that we must identi­fy with them. ‘If you smile, you are a smile, if you love, you are love, if you attend, you are atten­tion, if you speak, you are the word…’ If, how­ever, we carry this train of thought fur­ther, ‘if you are angry, you are anger, if you identi­fy with suf­fer­ing, you are suf­fer­ing’?! We must find the hid­den pas­sage between self-decep­tion and mas­ochism. For many live fool­ishly, and few die wisely…