I’ve told this story before on other sites, but it always bears repeating.

Here is an ancient Taoist story which emphasizes that this world is Nirvana if we could only see it with the eye of Nirvanoception. The tale also illustrates the view of Shunryu Suzuki that, “Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity. What we are speaking about is moment-to-moment enlightenment, one enlightenment after another.”

The Truth in the White Mist concerns a scholar called Fan who, despite an excess of worldly honours, finds the evils of the society he lives in hard to bear. On the death of his father, he decides to retreat to the solitude of the mountains and become an Immortal. He finds himself a small hermitage and furnishes it as best he can with the few possessions he has brought with him and whatever he can gather from the forest. Day after day, year after year, he spends his time studying his books, meditating and, as befits a Taoist, communing with nature. He quickly becomes attuned to the pace and rhythm of the natural world and acquires a sort of peace. One thing eludes him however: Nirvana itself, the enlightenment he yearns for as the crowning glory of his life and efforts. Had he left the world of dust in vain? Were all his accomplishments as scholar and healer to no avail on the most important journey of all?

One day Fan had a visitor. He was a man of sagely bearing, but with a youthfulness that betrayed a successful cultivation of the Way. The man enquired generally after Fan’s health and well-being, then broached the topic that was always on his host’s mind. How was it that a scholar of such high attainments had not even found the entrance to the Path of the Immortals which, he added mischievously, was staring him right in the face? Noting Fan’s embarrassment, he warned him against looking for it in the beauties of nature: dawns and sunsets, the brilliance of fast-moving mountain streams, the high banks of snowy-white cloud formations. No, he insisted, look for it in the mists which creep and spread through the valleys like a shroud. And then he left.

Fan spent the next three years staring down the mountain sides at the swirling mists below. But of enlightenment there was none. Passing foresters thought him a true sage because of his stillness and complete absorption. Fan knew better.

Then one day he saw it. Racing down the mountain to the stream where his visitor lived, he burst in upon him, his face shining with delight.

“You have found the Way”, cried his friend, “I always knew you would!”

Fan explained: “I suddenly saw it : these clouds, the sun and moon, the passing seasons, the daily grind ~ they are all in the Way! Why should my thoughts separate me from what has always been mine. Just to live is to follow the Way, to be born as an Immortal! Not to resist life, to be part of it, swept along by it, that is the Way. To have faith in your own destiny, to trust life itself to deliver you where you are meant to be and want to go, that is Immortality!”

Ha ha ha! laughed Fan’s friend, “At last I have found my true master!”

Watching the way the old time religions try to resolve their antagonisms with each other is always interesting. They usually begin by invoking a common deity and a shared interest in a united front against the forces of atheism (read “evil”) in the world.

This approach is never sustainable, however, since much of the world’s terrorism is fuelled by adherents of those same religions. It’s an internal problem, not an external one.

It’s true that many terrorists are not “religious” at all but psychopaths looking for a cause that will allow them to express their blind anger and vent their blood lust. But, if a faith harbours such animosity that it acts as a magnet for such people, it has only itself to blame.

The worst cases of this religious hatred are to be found in the three Abrahamic religions : Judaism, Roman Christianity and Islam. Why should that be?

They are all “book” religions, depending on “revelatory” texts to underscore their beliefs. These beliefs, of course, are a moveable feast which feed off contradictions in the texts to support just about anything they want. Protestant Christians are said to have over 20,000 denominations. Atheists, not unreasonably, claim that this invalidates them altogether.

The Abrahamic faiths also come from that hotbed of incendiary politics, the Middle East, where religious faith has been ruthlessly politicized for two or more millennia.

In the West now, a sharp reaction to the Abrahamic frenzy has been discernible for some time. People are turning away in droves from the old, barnacle-encrusted religions towards a more “modern” spirituality. That is to say, to practices which emphasize direct experience of spiritual reality, without the intervention of a “church”, although it may involve a “guru”, or teacher.

If this is the way the world — or a significant part of it — is going, why not use that trend to mitigate the failures of the old system, without seeming to attack it.

If every church or faith, reiterated its support for a universal spirituality that transcended the cultural forms that dominate individual religions, their members would not find themselves in the awkward position of having to defend a set of old rules and rituals against another set of old rules and rituals, thus in a bound removing the sparking points of religious conflict.

In other words, recognize a global mysticism above religion and its institutions.

It could be done, but it would take a lot of will and sacrifice on the part of religious leaders who are already inculcated with the need to hold their own “turf”.

I usually buy Gordon Smith’s latest books as they are published, because they always contain rich nuggets of wisdom on all aspects of the spiritual and the afterlife.

Gordon Smith is generally held to be the most accurate spiritual medium in Britain. He started life in a lowly part of Glasgow, ran his own hairdressing business for a while, and now makes his living as a TV presenter and an author of books.

The following passage occurs in his latest volume : Stories From The Other Side.

Our consciousness keeps expanding but because we live in a world where there are linear thought and time and space we are restricted by what we can describe and what we can understand.

The very nature of our existence is about ripening our consciousness. So often people restrict themselves by thinking that everything has to be achieved or got over in this life. It is such an unburdening process to come to the realision that there is no beginning and no end.

Eventually we learn to mistrust the material world because everything we hold on to ages and dies, including our bodies — a process we monitor daily. As that happens, we become dimly aware of a realm above the bodily which, strangely, a part of us already inhabits.

Gordon Smith is acutely aware of the thin veil which prevents many of us seeing beyond the linear aspects of our daily lives.

Although D.H. Lawrence is known as a very physical writer — to put it mildly — he was also spiritual in his finer moments. Look at this passage from Chapter 15 of Women in Love:

“Whatever life might be, it could not take away death, the inhuman transcendent death. Oh, let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human, and in death we do not know, we are not human. And the joy of this compensates for all the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity. In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know. The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority.”

Take away the novelist’s sentiment and there are some interesting points made here.

For example, “the inhuman transcendent death” recognizes that while consciousness persists at death, our human traits do not. We transcend ourselves at death.

Lawrence realizes that our humanity is the least of us : “the bitterness of knowledge and the sordidness of our humanity”. We know he often celebrated “the sordidness of humanity”, but here, using a different mouthpiece, he raises his game considerably.

In fact, those who reach out most to the concreteness of life, are often touched by the spiritual. It’s as if in glorifying the world they pass through the thin veil that separates us from the ineffable.

“In death we shall not be human, and we shall not know.” This passage echoes the 14th-century English spiritual text, The Cloud of Unknowing in which the aspirant meets the transcendent “and it is unlike anything we could possibly imagine here on Earth”.

“The promise of this is our heritage, we look forward like heirs to their majority.” Not everyone does, of course, but a touch of poetic licence is well earned.

Novelists often get closer to the meaning of things than scientists and philosophers. Here we see that most physical of men demonstrating a profound knowledge of “the other side”.

Quotation taken from Hemingway Serial.