Tuesday, May 15, 2012

How to flow...............or, "all right doing is accomplished only in a state of true selflessness"

".....there is one scarcely avoidable danger that lies ahead of the pupil on his road to mastery.  Not the danger of wasting himself in idle self-gratification 'for the East has no aptitude for this cult of ego' but rather the danger of getting stuck in his achievement, which is confirmed by his success and magnified by his renown:  in other words, of behaving as if the artistic existence were a form of life that bore witness to its own validity.
     "The teacher foresees this danger.  Carefully and with the adroitness of a psychopomp he seeks to head off the pupil in time and to detach him from himself.  This he does by pointing out, casually and as though it were scarcely worth a mention in view of all that the pupil has already learned, that all right doing is accomplished only in a state of true selflessness, in which the doer cannot be present any longer as 'himself.'  Only the spirit is present, a kind of awareness which shows no trace of ego-hood and for that reason ranges without limit through all the distances and depths, with 'eyes that hear and ears that see.'
     "Thus the teacher lets his pupil voyage onward through himself."
-Eugen Herrigel,  Zen In The Art of Archery

thanks Jeff

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