Curtis, I'm kinda writing this to you because I think you'll understand. Today was sort of a Bad Day. It started with me logging on to an Internet discussion forum (not this one) and finding some- one I actually know talking about the problem of illegal immigration in the United States.
This fellow was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was educated at all the best prep schools and then his parents paid for him to go to MIT, where he studied math and computer science and artificial intelligence. He almost certainly makes over $200K a year in the latter field. And he calls himself a Buddhist, because he studied for years with the same Rama fellow that I did, and Rama called what he taught in his last years Buddhism. (It wasn't.) And so what this guy is spending his time doing these days is lobbying for stiffer laws against illegal immigration. What he wants to do is round everyone up, put them in confinement camps until transportation arrives, and then "send them all back where they came from." He has very logical reasons for doing this, and is willing to expound upon them ad nauseum. It's disheartening, dude. Like you, I've sat down and had long conversations with "common folk," many of whom were illegal immigrants to the US or France. During my lifetime I have had conversations with bums, with whores and pimps, with a murderer (who was a TMer, by the way), with atheists and with total materialists. Not ONE of them was any less "spiritual" than any of the "spiritual" people I've met in over 40 years of spiritual seeking. And to be honest, most of them were nicer people than the people I know who consider themselves spiritual. The teachers that many of these "spiritual" people revere taught compassion, and performing good works for those less fortunate than you are. Wasn't it Jesus who said something about a man being measured by the way he treats "the least among us?" All this talk, talk, talk on Internet spiritual forums about how highly evolved we are, and how special we are, and how much we're doing for the world just by, well, being US. And then I read something like what I read this morning coming from one of these special, highly-evolved people. And then I think about the illegal aliens and the bums and the pimps and the whores and the murderer and the atheists and the materialists I've talked with, and I remember how they walked the walk of *their* lives, and I just shake my head in wonder. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's really a pleasure to encounter someone like you -- and a few others on this forum -- who actually seem to walk the walk of their talk.
