Chapter 2 Shell and Core

I have drunk cup after cup of bitter wine, even the remaining juice is as sweet as honey. I climbed the hard way, and finally reached the green plain. Every friend I lost in the night fog will be found again in the dawn light. How many times have I cloaked my pain and annoyance under a cloak of stoicism, thinking it would be compensated and relieved.However, when I took off my coat, I found that the pain has been transformed into joy, and the troubles have been transformed into silence and peace. How many times have I walked in the world of appearances with my companions, and I have said to myself, "How stupid and dull he is!" elegant.

How many times have I passed out on my own drink and I have seen myself and my drinking buddies as sheep and wolves.After sobering up, look again, I am a human being, and he is also a human being. Me and you, people, are deluded by the appearances around us and blind to our hidden essence.When one of us stumbles, we say he is fallen; when he staggers, we say he is decadent; when he mumbles, we say he is dumb; gasp, he was dying. You and I are both focused on the shell of "me" and the surface of "you", so we cannot see what the soul reveals to "me" and what the soul hides from "you".

What can we do if we ignore the truth in us with the pride that overwhelms us? I say to you, perhaps my words are a mask that hides my true face; I say to you, and I say to myself, that what we see with our eyes is but a dark cloud everything we see; what we hear with our ears is but a tinkle that distorts what we should grasp with our hearts.Therefore, when we see a policeman take a person to prison, we should not draw conclusions on which of the two is the criminal; when we see a person covered in blood and another with stained hands, it is wise to do Were not to be sure which must be the murderer and which must be the slain; and when we hear the one singing and the other weeping, let us bear it till we can be sure which is the merry one.

No, my brother!Don't use a person's external things to infer his truth, and don't take someone's words or actions as his inner mark, because maybe the person who is clumsy, slurred, and you think is stupid, his intuition It is the way of wisdom, and his heart is the sanctuary of understanding; perhaps the man who is ugly, whose life is rough, and whom you despise, is a gift from heaven on earth; a gift from God among men. . You might visit a palace and a thatched cottage in one day.You walk out of the palace with reverence, and out of the hut with pity.But if you can tear apart the fabric of your senses, your reverence will weaken to the level of regret, and your compassion will change to the level of reverence.

You may meet two people between dawn and dusk, the first one speaks to you with the din of the storm in his voice and the majesty of the army in his movements; the second one speaks to you with fear and trembling voice stuttering.So you attribute decisiveness and bravery to the first place; you attribute incompetence and weakness to the second place.However, if you see the sun and the moon teaching them to face adversity, or to make sacrifices for a certain principle, you will definitely understand: brazenness and exaggeration are not bravery, and shyness and silence are not cowardice. You may look out the window of your living room and you see a nun walking on the right and a prostitute walking on the left among the passers-by, and you immediately say, "How noble this is! How ugly that is!" But if you close your Your eyes, listen for a moment, and you'll hear a voice as soft as a whisper in space saying, "This one begs me with prayer, and the other begs me with pain, and in the souls of both of them there is something that belongs to you." An umbrella for my soul."

You may be cruising the land in search of what you call civilization, progress.You walk into a city, where the palaces are majestic, the colleges are grand, the streets are wide, and people come and go in a hurry.This one burrows into the ground, that one hovers in the air, this one catches lightning, and that one interrogates the air.They were all dressed in well-proportioned and well-made clothes, as if they were at a festival or a party. After a few days, you come to another city.The houses here are small and the streets are narrow.When it is cloudy and rainy, the whole city becomes a mud island in the water town of Zeguo.As the sun rises, the city turns into a cloud of dust again.The residents here are still between natural and simple, like a loose bowstring between the two ends of the bow.They walked slowly and dragged their feet on work.When they look at you, there seems to be another pair of eyes behind the eyes, staring at the target far away from you.So you leave the city in disgust.Say in your heart, "The difference between what I saw in that city and what I saw in this city is like the difference between the newborn and the dying. There, the tide is strong; here, it is weak. There , Vigorous as spring and summer; here, silent as autumn and winter. There, perseverance is youth, dancing in the garden; here, decadence is old man, falling in the ashes."

But if you could look at these two cities by the light of God, you would surely see them as two alike trees in the same garden.Insight may lead your eye to the nature of both, and you will see that the one you thought was rising was only a sparkling bubble about to burst; It is the essence of the implication which is fixed and unchanging. No, life is not its appearance, but its content; visible things do not lie in their shells, but in their core; the essence of the world does not lie in their faces, but in their hearts. No, religion does not consist in what is manifested in churches and temples, nor in what is manifested in rites and customs, but in what is hidden in the mind, purified and turned into treasure by the mind.

No, art is not in the intonation of a song you hear through your ears, or the words in a poem; art is not in the lines and colors of a painting you see through your eyes, but in coming to the poem. The silent trembling space distance in the cadence of the song; it lies in the tranquility that penetrates into your body and mind through this poem, and the thing that lives alone in the poet's soul; What I saw at the time was farther and more beautiful than this painting. No, my brother!Day and night are not what they appear to be.I walk in the ranks of day and night.I am not in these words to you, but in the serenity of my heart that these words bring to you.So you shouldn't call me a fool until you examine my hidden self; don't call me a genius until you expose my conventional self; don't say "He is a miser"; nor do you say "he is a generous man" without knowing the background of my generosity; and do not say "he is a generous man" until my love is clearly manifested to you in all its light and fire. Call me a lover; don't you think I'm carefree and carefree until you touch my bloody wound.