Spiritual Atheism

I met Hisamatsu one time in my life-he was eightyeight; I've not ever seen anyone so delighted at being alive. The ambivalence I felt between wanting that delight and the fear of the try that lay ahead if I were to attain it convuls me in tears halfway back to Kyoto. No individual volunteers to be, as he describes the twinkling prior to his awakening: "black, and with no means of escape left make open in the entirety of his existence, not smooth one the size of the opening in a needle." Nor can individual willingly endure one's consciousness and being as the aperture of a camera trying to shut up itself, as U. G. Krishnamurti described the twinkling of an eye antecedent to his. But the "method" of "cornered, then passing through" which Zen expresse with the dictum: "At the lower part of the great doubt lies the great awakening," is, I believe, the alone "path" there can be. The dead-locked "I," at the extremity of its un-bearability, as DeMartino liked to say, no longer can bear the weight of itself and breaks up Its breaking up is its breaking [i]or[/i] part of to the other No one sets out upon this path intentionally. To the contrary, we line up and burst out of the starting gate. After a while we check our progres and find we are in the starting gate. in like manner we intensify our effort, monitor in what way far we have come, find we are in the starting gate still. This drives us to greater effort. The starting gate clings to our heels. for a like reason we make greater effort, including the effort of "letting go" on the other hand the starting gate is not something individual can leave through forward motion. The trap door giving way-in the last failed effort to break from the starting gate-is the sole way.

The introduction to the Penguin edition of Maugham's The Razor's cutting side informs us that the translation to the line from the Katha- Upanishad that foreheads his novel