Sensei of Shambala - страница 2

Amazed by the extraordinary capabilities of these people and by the depth of their understanding of this world, I felt that it had awaken in me some kind of internal power… hope, vague anticipation that the death of my body is not my end! That insight so touched me and inspired something inside of me that I quickly started not only to get out of my depression, but even felt somehow a new impulse for life even though my mind, like before, was aware of inevitable death because few people had ever recovered from cancer. But the new under standing didn’t dispirit me and didn’t cause fear. Something inside of me simply refused to believe in it. And what’s most interesting, it unconsciously started to resist my heavy, dark thoughts.

This new feeling again made me revisit my life and how foolishly I’ve lived it. I didn’t do anything bad in it. But it was absolutely obvious that every day, every hour, I was justifying my own egotism, selfishness, laziness. I wasn’t striving to know myself but rather how to gain more points in society through that knowledge. Or, to make a long story short, in all my life, studies, and family life, only one thought was hiding behind it all: “Me, myself and I.” And the realization that this small bodily empire of “me” was coming to the big end, that is, to the real death, gave birth in me to all that animal fear, horror, despair, and hopelessness that I had been so intensively experiencing in the last couple of weeks. I realized that death is not as fearsome as its foolish anticipation. Because in reality, it’s not the bodily death you are waiting for, but the crash of your egotistic world, which you’ve been building so hard all your life.

After that realization, I clearly understood that the life I lived and what I’ve done in it is a sand-castle on the sea shore, where any wave will wash away all my efforts in a second. And nothing will be left, only emptiness, the same one that was before me. It seemed to me that most people around me also waste their lives with sandcastles, thoroughly building them, some closer and some further from the coastline. But the result will inevitably be the same for all of them – one day all will be destroyed by the wave of time. But there are people who sit on dry land and impartially observe this human illusion. Or maybe not even observe, but look afar, over it, at something eternal and unchanging. I wonder, what do they think about, what is their internal world like? After all, if they have comprehended this mortality, it means that they have realized something really important, something really worth spending their life on.

These questions began to worry me more than anything else. But I didn’t find answers to them. Then I turned to the literature of major world religions. The Great figures, such as Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, were those who had already been observing from the shore. But how did they get the re? It’s written everywhere: by concentration, faith, prayer. But how? Explanations of their followers were so confusing, so odd and veiled, that my brain was falling asleep when my eyes were making efforts to read the same words ten times over. The teachings of those geniuses were interesting, but they only reflected the common truth of all mankind. Perhaps the essential grain of knowledge was hidden in between the lines. But, alas, I was just an ordinary human being, not the “chosen” one, so I wasn’t able to grasp it with my mind although reading of certain lines did evoke something inside of me.