Imagine you’re looking at a spectrum, a line representing two extremes.
On one end, you have complete austerity, whatever that means to you. On the other, you have complete indulgence.
Or, perhaps, on one end you have deeply blissful highs, and on the other you have crushing, depressing lows.
It’s tempting, is it not, to think of The Middle Way as a kind of compromise between the two.
“Yeah, have a little chocolate cake, just not too much.”
From the perspective of living in the extremes, the middle way can look like a kind of luke-warm, dad-joke, have-it-both-ways compromise you sigh your way into after you get your first real job.
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But, I am purporting here and have directly experienced: that’s not all it is
And in fact that’s only the most surface layer, the what it looks like, in the same way that a plastic rose can kind of look like a rose, but really they are nothing alike.
Back to our initial image of the spectrum, it’s as if from one perspective yes, this middle way is, indeed, in the middle of two points.
But then the perspective shifts, and this third point is actually on another plane altogether.
From this new perspective, it’s not a “middle point” at all. It is something else entirely.
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There’s a depth there that you cannot fathom. (I can’t either.)
There’s a holding of opposites — where either/or breaks down, not for lack of intellect but for sudden uselessness of the map of logic itself — that you cannot fathom.
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So, how to find it, to get to know this depth?
1. Lots of good resources out there these days; thank goodness.
2. For lack of any more detail, try this one on: Follow your heart is step one. Step two is vital: now act. That thing stirring in your guts that you know calls you, perhaps terrifyingly so: that. It’s secret work, and it’s extremely, and only, personal to you.