Egots död

“How could he be a genuine mystic and be so addicted to nicotine and alcohol?’ Or have occasional shudders of anxiety? Or be sexually interested in women? Or lack enthusiasm for physical exercise? Or have any need for money?

Such people have in mind an idealized vision of the mystic as a person wholly free from fear and attachment, who sees within and without, and on all sides, only the translucent forms of a single divine energy which is everlasting love and delight, as which and from which he effortlessly radiates peace, charity, and joy. What an enviable situation! We, too, would like to be one of those, but as we start to meditate and look into ourselves we find mostly a quaking and palpitating mess, and that this, in turn, is a natural form of the universe like rain and frost, slugs and snails, flies and disease. When the “true mystic” sees flies and disease as translucent forms of the divine, that does not abolish them. I - making no hard-and-fast distinction between inner and outer experience - see my quaking mess as a form of the divine, and that doesn’t abolish it either. but at least I can live with it.

Perhaps all this is a way of saying that I see the same problems in being natural, genuine, or authentic as the saints have found in their efforts to be truly humble, contrite, and in love with God. You can’t make it without faking it, for the real thing is a grace not of your own making, which comes upon some people as involuntarily as their lovely eyes or golden hair. It is thus that by grace or by nature (take your choice) I am a mystic in spite of myself, remaining as much of an irreducible rascal as I am, as standing example of God’s continuing compassion for sinners or, if you will, of Buddha-nature in a dog, or of light shining in darkness. Come to think of it, in what else could it? (Watts 211-212)”