On Saving Others by Yao Xiang Shakya
All one can do is hope to endure the pain that comes with creation. Mary Kinzie
We cannot escape the material world in watery attempts to save another. The same is true when we ourselves might want another to save us. This murky bath of wishful salvation often in the guise of niceness, of fixing, or defending ourselves or another is off the mark and is no match for the relentless suffering of desire that is at the root of all our misery.
It is spiritual materialism in the form of a bandaid which arises in the guise of being nice….being a nice person….or wanting someone to be nice to us….
Salvation and being nice have nothing to do with one another. Being nice is a worldly convention salvation requires a leaping clear.
In order to stick with the work of spiritual salvation, we must know this or we will be duped by those who see themselves as nice….or our own internal wish to be saved by a nice person….or thinking being nice is salvation.
Being nice, being a nice person, wishing for others to be nice to us clouds and weakens our endurance to face the pain that comes with the creation of what it takes to be a spiritual aspirant. It is a mistake of the novice or one who thinks he is a spiritual seeker but who has gone off in the wrong direction.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with any particular religion, dogma or doctrine.
When we make this mistake we do not yet know a basic requirement of a spiritual path; we do not know what is real and unreal. If we want a spiritual life, when we seek the higher aim with conviction, we seek the real. But often we stumble at this very first requirement. We do not know what is real and unreal and often mistake the unreal for the real.
Once we fall for the unreal it leads to defensiveness. We defend the unreal with pride and anger.
This unreal place is difficult because we tend to respond to what we think is real even when it is not. Our devotion to it strengthens around our pride, a sense of self-satisfaction of seeing the unreal as real. It’s the classic tale of mistaking a rope for a snake and responding to it as a snake. This is known as hell for we have forsaken heaven for something unreal. We have wandered off the narrow path in reaction for the sake of something unreal.
The unreal will never sate or satisfy our thirst for God.
The first step for a spiritual aspirant is to begin to look for the real and unreal, even a little discrimination is helpful….because the seeker can cultivate it.