Meditation

They are far away from us, and this we must not forget. Insight requires: exercises in meditation, a life of indifference toward the world and its tasks. It will not suffice to attempt a scientific experiment and see how much we can accomplish with a few Yoga exercises. Nor will it suffice to develop a mood of indifference to the world and devote ourselves to contemplation. Those who have not tested the progress of which they are capable by years of meditative exercises grounded in the proper faith and way of life, can understand only as much as is communicable in rational thought. There flows a source which we Westerners have not tapped, and consequently there is a limit to our understanding. To participate in the essence of the truth, we should have to cease to be what we are. The difference lies not in rational positions but in the whole view of life and manner of thinking.

But the remoteness of meditation need not make us forget that we are all human, all facing the same questions of human existence. A great solution was found and put into practice. Our task is to acquaint ourselves with it and as far as possible to understand it.

The question is: To what extent can we understand what we ourselves are not and what we ourselves do in practice? Such an understanding is possible if we avoid excessive haste and supposedly definitive interpretations. In understand, we keep alive potentialities that are locked deep within ourselves, and by understanding we learn not to take our own objective historicity for the absolute, exclusive truth. Everything that is said is addressed to a normal waking consciousness and must therefore be largely accessible to rational thought.

The fact that life was possible and has been a reality in various parts of Asia down to our own day-this is a great and important fact. It points to the questionable essence of man. A man is not what he just happens to be; he is open. For him there is no one correct solution.

Emptiness is the embodiment of a humanity which recognizes no obligations toward the world, but which in the world departs from the world. It does not struggle or resist. Looking upon itself as an existence that has come into being through ignorance, it desires only extinction, but this so radically that it does not even yearn for death, because it has found an abode of eternity beyond life and death.