lecture given in 1992

"There is a tempering that needs to go on, an acknowledgment of our vulnerability and all the things that we don't know. The simultaneity of our wisdom and our foolishness. This is "The Clearly Enlightened Person Falls into a Well" koan. You can actually have a very deep understanding of the spiritual world and still do something stupid and still have areas of your life that are inferior and that you're not very good at, kind of stupid at, and that doesn't make you a less spiritual person. But noticing it makes you a more spiritual person. Being prepared to have the shame of it and the disappointment of it, because it's very hard on your grandiosity, somehow that allows the spirit to come through in this purer way. Then something real can happen. Real teaching can happen. Real love can happen and the beauty of the world is the beauty of the Buddha's path just there before us then. But it's not if we're not prepared to accept our own stupidity, not in a complacent way, but in a way that's engaged. We notice what we're not very good at. We notice our pain when we're in it and allow it to be there. We have to allow the darkness in the world in order to experience the light. Our first move, you see, in spirit is always to transcend. We always want to go straight to the light. My own experience was of going up and then down and then not knowing which way was which after a while, I suppose. We have to let in, in some way hold, the opposites, hold the very small parts of who we are along with the rather grand, eternal parts of who we are and not let one take over. When one takes over we become less than human."
- John Tarrant
Soul in Zen
a lecture given in 1992