In our daily life we are constantly in contact with the world. We are constantly interfacing with the world. We are constantly manipulating the things that we see in the world to our own benefit. We are constantly doing things to make the world move in a certain direction for us. We see the world, we touch the world, we hear the world, we taste the world, we smell the world; we are engulfed in the world.
And we talk about not being attached to any of this. We talk about not being attached to all the things that we see. We talk about not being attached to all the things that we hear and touch. We talk about not being attached to all the things that we do in our jobs and that we do to make the world be more palatable to us.
In doing all of these things, they don’t always go the way we want them to go. We can’t always make things happen the way we think they should happen. This leads to stress, and to anxiety, and makes our life difficult. It makes us, as opposed to less attached, it makes us more attached. Stress is a result of being too attached to the world. Anxiety is a result of being too attached to the world. Worrying is a result of being too attached to the world and to the outcomes of what it is that we’re doing.
There’s a story about a man with a bow and arrow, and he had made the bow out of a young sapling. And he took it, and he bent it, and he put the necessary string in, and he used it. One day someone came by, and he saw the man’s bow but it didn’t have the string in it, and he said, “Of what use is the bow without the string?”
And he said, “Well, if you keep the string in the bow, and never take it out, the bow becomes stiff. It loses its elasticity and it can’t really be used well anymore. There has to be a time when the bow is at rest, but at total rest, and allowed to go back to its original form so that you can make it do what it needs to do later on, it has the right amount of tension to be able to do that.”
It’s like that with us, we have to be able to find a time where we let go. But not just let go a little bit, let go entirely where we are no longer involved in the active pursuit of manipulation of the world, where we’re no longer involved in the active pursuit of pushing and pulling all the things that we see and hear; where we are at absolute rest.
How do we get to that place and are we capable of getting to that place? Or are we so involved in what we’re doing that we can never leave that place?
I have a few seminal stories that I repeat over and over because they make such important points. When I was about 27 or 28 years old I was working for a lawyer, and I had a question, and he took me into the library (oh, by the way he was 78 years old), he took me into the library, and he pulled out a book and he turned to a page, and there was the answer to the question. He knew where the case was that answered the question, and I said to him, “That’s pretty good.”
And he said, “Well, this is all I know: this library I carry with me everywhere I go. If I’m with my wife, I’m in the library; if I’m with my children, I’m in the library; if I’m with my grandchildren, I’m in the library; if I go to pray, I’m in the library. Don’t become like me.”
He couldn’t let go, ever. He carried the burden with him…
