Underworld

In 1990 my teacher said to me, "It's OK to be human but you should try your best not to be". At the time I had no idea what he really meant. I had recently split with a woman and was still whimpering so I assumed he just wanted me to pull my self together and get on with it - be a man. However, there is an internal aspect to most things, and there most certainly is a deeper and more internal aspect to everything your teacher utters in your presence, even if they are unaware of it. Even the most flippant and seeming friendly exchange drips with meaning and danger. As he said to me yesterday, "Real laughter can only come from a very serious person". This statement suggests maybe a yin/yang interpretation: the smile and the frown being the two sides of the coin. However, I know him better than that. Both statements are the same and are saying that whatever emotional state you find yourself in, there is always a ground beneath it free of feelings that you should be inhabiting. This is the real purpose of sinking - to touch this cold world. It is a world totally free of sentiment and pity. In it there is no coming together or pushing apart, no connexion or disconnexion. When you enter it you become it - you permeate and know all parts of it. That knowledge is before knowing - it permeates all of you. The knowledge is the world. It really is like the ground, life issues from it and death goes back to it, yet it is both before and after life and death. Human concepts do not register, let alone exist. You may enter this world when your energy shifts - when your identity becomes unstable - during meditation or during moments of great stress or emotional turmoil - you'll catch a glimpse of this world through the cracks in your self-assurance. The important thing is to get to know it and take the flavour of it into everything you do. If you manage this then you'll save years. When Yang Cheng-fu said Tai Chi is the art of concealing hardness with softness, the hardness he refers to is this ruthless ground to which the roots of all things cling, unknowingly, for support.