I was dipping into ' The Power of Now ' by Eckhart Tolle the other night, many years after first reading it. I don't know if it is my age or just that I am looking at it from a Buddhist perspective but I found myself becoming a bit irritated. There is something about these new age gurus that increasingly strikes me as somewhat smug. So many of them are just regurgitating and repackaging old wisdom. Perhaps it has always been thus? If it gets each new audience to look at these things then it does indeed have a purpose. I was talking to a man who had just joined our meditation group. He was an expert in Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and he had just realised how much CBT owes to the Buddhist understanding of the human mind!
Anyway as any one who has ever read my blog knows, I myself think animals, birds and nature anchor us in ' The Now ' I was therefore pleased to agree with Eckhart when he wrote that he had lived with several Zen Masters, all of them cats! He then went on to write about ducks and the spiritual lesson they give. The lesson being that even when their serenity is interrupted by a brief squabble they just flap their wings and sail serenely on as if nothing had happen. In other words they do not hold onto negativity and resentment about the fight and continue to live in the now. The picture is of Mandarin Ducks so being Chinese they perhaps are followers of Confucius. They could also be Buddhist ducks but either way they were very serene.
I have never thought about the serenity of ducks before until this post :)
ReplyDelete