Consequences of Infinite Life
Infinite Life – awakening to bliss within
Robert Thurman
Publisher: Riverhead books, New York.
ISBN: 1-59448-069-9
The Buddha taught that immense positive potential exists within each and every one of us, just waiting to be unleashed. We are naturally full of love and compassion since we have labored and virtuously throughout many lives to become human beings. Now, with our highly advanced life-form relatively free from negative instinctual drives, we are poised and ready to pursue the path to the total bliss that is enlightenment.
The actuality of our past personal continuity is so important because it bears so strongly on our future. Where will we go from here? Our spiritual evolution, like out physical development, is an ongoing process. When you take responsibility for it, you can consciously, and therefore more accurately, aim yourself toward the achievement of a secure state of bliss for yourself and for others. You gain a sense of connectedness with all life that gives you great strength. You become determined to develop positively. You realize how tremendously meaningful is the slightest action, word, or even thought, and so you take ever more care to be virtuous in your acts of body, speech and mind.
I call this the real “evolutionary insight” – the sense of personal involvement in your own inevitable evolutionary causality. While there is no avoiding the chance that you might experience great negatively at some point in the future, the risk is worthwhile because the evolutionary insight brings with it an infinite horizon of positively. You benefit from a healthy alertness to the danger of evolutionary self-neglect.
When you realize the boundless nature of your self, you know your immortality and so take responsibility for its good quality. You gradually but perceptibly brighten and energize your world until you break out of your shell, opening your cocoon to spread your colorful wings and fly up into the sunlight. You no longer need fear death, as you know that you will merely pass into another life. You can experience the taste of true freedom for the first time, just as I did when I floated down that street in New Jersey years ago. You can feel confident that you will find fulfillment and empowerment, if not now then at some point in the future. When you frame your present existence in this radically transformed context, you make the shift from terminal life to infinite life, and suddenly everything becomes possible.
This book is available for sale in
Buddhist Philosophy Bookshop, Hong Kong. |
