Good and Evil

When the child ran out in front of my car it was as if I watched it all unfolding in slow motion. I slammed on my brakes but the tires found no purchase on the wet pavement. A second before the child slammed into the grillwork I closed my eyes. When the police arrived I failed to tell them I was talking on my cell phone when the accident happened. I rationalized to myself that it wouldn’t have mattered either way.

He said how she told him that she was afraid of the water. He later told his attorney how he forced her into the quarry lake anyway to hold her head under until she drowned. When I heard the authorities had arrested him and charged him with her murder I couldn’t believe it. I had worked with him for years. He was trying to quit smoking. He was trying to improve himself. I thought I knew him better.

She said he didn’t understand her. She was tired of being the good wife, she was sick of being taken for granted, so she took to running around in the bars and having sex with strange men. When her husband confronted her she confessed her infidelities. She packed up her clothes. She left him and the children behind to go live with one of her drunken suitors. When he told me why they were divorcing I couldn’t believe it. I thought I knew them both better.

Though most everyone judges people during each waking moment by their deeds I know that just as no one is completely evil, there isn’t a soul who is completely good. What is the worst thing you’ve ever done to someone? What is the best deed you’ve ever bestowed on another? How do we mete out these fluctuating aspects of ourselves in the end?

Even the masters differ on this.

There are two paths leading from here to there. The first path depends upon constantly doing something while the second path resides in forever doing nothing. The first path is the way of desire and want. Those who travel this way never have enough and so are always discontent. The second path is the way of letting go of this and refusing to pick up that. Those who travel this way have nothing and yet are always content.

Ordinary people all rejoice in others who agree with them while they dislike those who are different. This rejoicing and that disliking arises from these people being bent on distinguishing themselves from others. They spend their lives gathering more than they will ever need and then refusing to share with those who have less.

If you look at someone who has nothing they are the friend of heaven and earth. They go forth as a shadow of substance, as an echo responding to a sound. Their movement leaves no trace, their path is like that of the sun, unending. They belong to the big self, having no small self of their own. Having no small self, how could anyone hope to possess even one thing?

I know the beauty of the sun rising on a new idea by witnessing the ugliness of the chaos before the dawn. I know the good things in life by the evil that is done in the world. We strive towards the good. No one wants to believe that they are evil. Still, without the evil there would be no good, without ugliness there would be no beauty, without the dead of winter there would be no rebirth of the spring.

So I come to see that having this and not having that arise alongside one another. Things which seem easy to do complement the difficulties arising in life. The massive mansion contrasts with the shotgun shack. Way up high rests on what is below. The mouth and the ear sing lyrics to each other. The back follows the front and so what goes around comes back once more.

I go about my life not doing anything. To those who are busy I may seem like a slacker, a person without ambition, someone going nowhere. They are right. I am as inscrutable about this as I am about that. I am silent like April snow. Like the noiseless flurry of fluttering flakes I too teach silence. I watch these thoughts as they arise, flourish, and then pass away without ending. They create the world and yet they create nothing.

Each day I go about my work of not-doing and yet everything is accomplished. Each night I practice this art of not-writing by sitting in front of this computer with nothing to say and no one to say it to. Soon I find the screen is filled with these words that haunt my dreams yet still the restlessness of my soul.

This work I soon forget. When a year has passed and I read these words that I write they will seem to me to have been written by someone else.

I cannot take credit for them.

They come from the mystery.

Therefore they will last forever.