Another Choice

The artist given to one’s art knows concretely that, if one is ever to attain accomplishment, not only the material, the form and the instrument must be assiduously worked on, but it is also necessary to reach self-forgetfulness and abandon oneself to the grace of an inspiration and a current of awareness that transcend the individuality and in no way belong to it. Likewise the researcher, whatever be the domain elected, in order to apprehend and grasp a new way of understanding, the contours of a law or a harmony, the process or the constitution of a given movement of matter must, beyond the acquired or transmitted knowledge, cross the circle of death – of those “real” facts which death is presenting – and open to another perception.

We must all pierce the shell.

***

By the pressure of the inner axis this perception of the Presence in every being as in everything discreetly and incomprehensibly develops and sharpens and the instants multiply in which this terrestrial life appears almost perfect and we experience it as such – its richness of possibilities, its infinite diversity, the profound beauty of its matter, the grace that causes all these unique beings to exist and all these miraculous forms and the sweet, puissant and intense harmony of nature and the tangible density of these gazes and these bodies and the complex magic of this entire relational space.

But how to live in joy and plenitude so long as even a single being remains enclosed in a prison of suffering, boredom, envy, rancor or hatred?

The more we cherish and appreciate these innumerable jewels which everywhere sparkle and shine in this physical world and the more grows a pain and stupefaction: how can at the same time all this horror and misery and ugliness and smallness and arrogant dumbness coexist with this entire marvel, within us, in our consciousnesses, upon this earth?

Is it due to the pain of separation, of having been projected into void and oblivion, precipitated into form and its imprisoning?

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