Letting Time Pass

People do not cage the owl or the crow, but the mynah and the parakeet—they lock these away. In crushing beauty by the force of mere strength, in turning the beautiful into the ugly, lies all of people's joy. They spit upon those whom they lack even the froth of spittle to be worthy of. Those whom the Creator loves are constantly wounded by those the Creator does not favor. A heart transparent as still water, trembling with clarity—people delight in fouling such hearts. This senseless, causeless cruelty teaches people to accept the world's ugliness, its pitilessness, as though it were natural; it initiates them into the art of surviving within that cruelty.

Through silent endurance, bearing unsought suffering with a smile, people grow strong. That is the true path—the path that tempers a human being. Cleverness or learning cannot accomplish anything in life. If one wishes to accomplish something, one must first seek the true path. In crisis, people may or may not offer wise counsel, yet they hurl arrows of meaningless words with perfect aim. The less one understands the weight of words, the more foolishly one speaks. It is easy to be swayed by such words. They do not diminish problems but multiply them. In that hour, silence can offer people wisdom. A calm heart mysteriously reveals the way out of crisis.

No matter what turmoil, conflict, upheaval, or chaos surrounds us, we must move through the circumstances with composure. We must, as much as possible, maintain goodwill with all, pass through this time without wounding anyone. However irritating or irrational others' words may sound, we must hear them with steadiness. Only afterward, with a clear mind, should we reflect on the various matters involved—offering no reply to anyone's words.

When we quiet the mind in stillness and meditate upon something, our intuition grows, and with it our intelligence and discernment work without limit. Our mind grows weary bearing the weight of all sorrow and suffering; we console it—all will be well. What our mind is, we are essentially that. Our mind guides us; when it breaks, the mind seeks peace; through the mind's strange chemistry we love or hate. Our body gives a false impression of who we are—people see us and think one thing, but we are not truly that. If people could see our mind, could understand what moves within it, then they would know what we truly are. We think and act precisely as we compose our mind. The mind's capacity determines the measure and nature of all our powers. When the mind fills with love, its capacity expands.

If what we must do awakens love within us, then neither fatigue nor tedium touches us in its doing. The work does not feel like a burden; thus its quality deepens. We maintain honesty and focus toward it; learning from the failures of the past, we can perform the task with such astonishing perfection that even when we dissolve into the womb of eternal time, all will remember us for ages and ages for that work.