CHAPTER 32
“When we are children,” Haridas said, “we are not concerned with
God, with spirituality, because we take them for granted. As children,
we are constantly filled with the wonder and mystery of the world.
Then we grow up and use religion or other ideas to fill the emptiness
that has appeared in our hearts. But where does the emptiness come
from? Why does it exist? It exists because we think that the mystery
is over and we have learned all there is to know about the world. But
we remember the paradise. Most every mythology in the world
remembers this paradise: Greek Atlantis, Christian Eden, even
Hinduism and Buddhism talk about an ancient time when man was
together with nature. But are these not just adult man’s hidden
memories of his youth? For children, the world is mystery unfolding
around us—we fall in love with nature and animals. Then when we
come to puberty we fall in love with sex and freedom. And when we
grow past this, we think we are at the top of the human mountain and
become sad that we cannot go any higher. What we don’t realize is
that maybe we hardly saw anything on the way up the mountain.
Now we think we are so smart. We become bored and lonely. And in
being lonely, create God to keep us warm. What every child knows, of
course, is that God is all around us.”
He reached out his hand and placed it on my forearm.
“This loneliness comes from being separate from existence. We
think loneliness comes from the absence of other human beings, but
being with others is only one way to interact with nature, and of
course the most obvious. There are many deeper and profound ways
to learn how to interact with nature. To fight against it causes
loneliness. To join with it is to find joy and power.”
“How do you join?” I asked.
“I have told you already. You must drop the ego, and the best
way to do that is to learn to wash the cup the ego is contained in—that
is the human mind.”
The days passed neither quickly nor slowly. They did seem strangely
full, however, as if more actually was happening than met the eye.
The simple acts of eating and talking and even just looking into the
distance, acts that were once taken for granted and done robotically
had apparently taken on a special deliberateness, a greater
BIG AMERICAN BREAKFAST
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