This is not a question of imposing upon the world of differences some abstract conception of unity in your mind. You don’t have to go around saying to yourself, “Now don’t get fussed. Don’t be disturbed. Be at peace. All things are fundamentally one.” You don’t have to do that at all. You have to see the secret that it’s the very differences of things, the very individuality of things, their prickly personal reality, that manifests, that shouts out, that advertises the underlying unity.
You know that you aren’t anymore just the fragmented individual. You know that what you are deep down at the very center is something beyond time and change.
In Buddhism they say our object is not to make stone Buddhas, but living Buddhas. A stone Buddha is a symbol of what we might call an ultra stoic: a person who so represses his fears and his emotions that he doesn’t have any left. And they say: well, if that’s your idea of a sage, a rock will do just as well. It doesn’t mean that. It means rather that you’re no longer afraid of being afraid, you’re no longer afraid of grief, of pain, of being sensed. You’re no longer afraid, in other words, to go into life with total zest.
Keeping moving in this sense is keeping alive, keeping things circulating, not hoarding, not blocking—not, as it were, getting clots of blood in one’s psychological and spiritual arteries.
