To Be Revealed

Because in our culture we overvalue the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands extraordinary intelligence. In fact, many kinds of cleverness are just further obscurations. There is a Tibetan saying; “If you are too clever, you could miss the point entirely.”

            Patrul Rinpoche said: “The logical mind seems interesting, but it is the seed of delusion.” People can become obsessed with their own theories and miss the point of everything. In Tibet we say:                                “Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they wear off.”

Glimpse After Glimpse

Sogyal Rinpoche

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There are those in AA that say: “Most of us are too smart to stay sober. We have to be dumbed-down to get it.” I have found that nothing obstructs spiritual progress more than intellectual arrogance. However, this doesn't mean I don’t use that product of millions of years of evolution behind my eyes and between my ears for nothing. It takes some training, but the intellect is able to function best when it is sidestepped and put in proper order. It is when I try to make sense of this business that the sense of it evades me. I don’t hold on to my ideas as fervently as I once did. My point of view has been blunted by the grinding wheel of experience. It has been tremendously liberating to be free of my own contrivances. Once, free of my opinions, I am able to say honestly what I know as opposed to what I have theories of.

Nietzsche wrote these controversial words in the very beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “For God is dead and his sinners died with him. The only sin now is to esteem the entrails of the unknowable more than the meaning of the Earth.”

Everyone gets hung up on those three words, “God is dead,” and avoid what the meaning of the Earth might be. It is what in front of me I can know in the here and now that warrants a higher priority, leaving the rest to be put on the shelf labeled “to be revealed.”

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