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THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA
Philosophic theory, religious belich, and intuitive experience support each other in India in the basic insight that, fundamentally, all is well. A supreme optimism prevails everywhere, in spite of the unromantic recognition that the universe of man's affairs is in the most imperlect state imaginable, one amounting practically to chaos. The world-root, the secret veiled reality, is of an indestructible diainond-hardness, even though we-our feelings, minds, and senses-can be in the wrong, and indeed mostly are. Mentally, bodily, and morally, we are far from perfection; hence we are incapable of mirroring truth and becoming aware of our basic serenity. That very truth, however, the highest reality, is ever and universally present, whether our consciousness gets in touch with it or not. Furthermore, even though in the realm of the perishable, in the passage between birth and death, in the sphere of suffering and delight, everything changes, above or beyond all these disturbing changes there remains the possibility of that one, supreme, composing change, which is unique and sui generis: the change in our own nature that puts an end to the derangements of change-through knowledge of the Unchangeable, which is the fundament of our own intrinsic, never-changing being.
That abiding presence is compared to the sun obscured from us by the cloud of the mind's unkvowing. Suffering, pain, and the disorders of the world do not represent the true state of things, but are the reflexes of our own wrong perspective, and yet they seem to us to be very real, until the obstruction is dissolved and the mind beholds the source of its own light. The cloud betwecn is small, yet it can cover with its little, perishable form the blazing presence. This cloud being blown away, the transcendent light is beheld immediately, of its own power, and yet even while obscured from us-unlooked upon, unrealized, unrevealed-it is ever there in its enduring splendor. And not only is it always there, it is the source and sustenance of everything that is here.
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