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PRELIMINARIES FOR SPIRITUAL GROWTH-PSYCHO. LOGICAL IMPLICATION OF THE PREPARATORY
STAGE IN BUDDHISM
H. V. Guenther
People in all ages have been under stress and have devised and tried various means to escape from it only to find to their dismay that the stress did not disappear but reasserted itself in other forms as threatening as before, if not even worse. This shows that escape is never an answer to the basic question of how to be a human being. Escape, whether it is into the mechanical uniformity and monotony of social conformity or into a fictitious world of some transcendental make-belief, is but an admission of having failed in the ever-present task of growing up. The latter form of escape is particularly dangerous as it leads a person to believe that he has enlarged the scope of awareness while actually he has run away from it and, instead of having gained insight, has blurred his view and diminished his capacity for thought by clinging to such fetish words as science, or creativity, or even intelligence. The attempted escape from stress has brought no vision which alone would have provided a basis for dealing with the problem at hand. Vision brings a new appreciation of what there is, it makes a person see things differently, not to see different things. After all nobody can ever escape Being, least of all his own being. It is the vision that gives meaning to our experiences and our actions by making us face the problem, and therefore also it alone gives 1. an a sense of direction and enables him to sketch a map which will guide him in his task of finding himself, not to run away from himself. SP-33
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