excerpt from
The Journey of Awakening: Conversation with Mark Nepo
by Marianna Caccaitore, Dec 19, 2011
posted at DailyGood.com
Marianna: Thank you. I'd like to begin our Journey of Awakening today with a sense of gratitude for being incarnate, here and now, as a human being. I'm wondering if you could help us get there by sharing your version of the Buddhist story about how rare it is to be born human.
Mark: Sure. As you say, wakefulness starts with our just remembering again and again our appreciation for really how rare it is to be here at all. As you know from my work, and any readers know, that I’m a cancer survivor. After all of that, I've come to feel that there is really no ‘bad weather’. The only bad weather is no weather. So it really puts things in a different perspective. But the story—one of the stories of Buddha—is that one of his students came and asked him, “How rare is it to be born as a human being?” and Buddha supposedly said, “Well imagine a tortoise in the ocean, on the bottom of the ocean, and it slowly rises, breaks surface and looks around, and then goes back to the bottom and goes back to sleep. The tortoise wakes a second time and now is moved back to the surface. The odds of it breaking surface in the same exact spot twice—that's how rare it is to be born in human form.”
2 connections:
And no one will ever be born in this form, my own, your own, anyone else's, again. We are all melting snowflakes in that ever-moving ocean.
I may protest and complain, at times, about my human state and my state in life, in general, but these last two months in India have taught me so much about myself and life in general. I've learned to appreciate so much and have met such wonderful people. And, as much son, Jeremy pointed out to me on skype yesterday,I have learned to do without a lot of the trappings I thought I needed to exist. Pretty sad it took me to the age of 67 to realize so much.
Post a Comment