Letter 23: Diogenes

To A.

The deepening of the inner life depends on the instantaneous recognition that we have harmed another. To take immediate responsibility is to begin working with Nature. Then we are setting our own future. In Buddhist psychology, the stages of enlightenment occur through a revulsion of the senses. When our human-ness dawns on us, we recoil at our actions. The recoil propels us like a slingshot into the heavens. We can never know what is right living, but we can know that our individual affirmations trend towards an ideal. And so man attains his freedom through ignorance, through not-knowing, as opposed to through knowledge. Diogenes was right. There is a time when we all used to "wet the bed."

As ever, D.

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