A coarse sieve catches little.
A fine mesh catches more.
If you want the subtle, be refined,
But prepare to deal with the coarse.The irony of spiritual living is that you become more sensitive and more subtle. Therefore, you become intolerant of the coarse. There is not much choice in this. If you want to catch the subtle things in life, then you must become refined yourself. But the coarser things will then accumulate all the more quickly. A coarse sieve in a rushing stream will hold back only debris and large rocks. A fine mesh will catch smaller things, but it will also retain the large.
Some people attempt to cope with this by becoming multilayered. They set up a series of screens to their personalities, from the coarse to the subtle so that they can deal with all that life has to offer. This is quite laudable from an ordinary point of view, but from the point of view of Tao, it is a great deal of bother.
What do we do? If we remain coarse, then only the coarse comes to us. If we become subtle, then we gain the refined but are plagued with the coarse as well. If we become multilayered, then we create a complexity that isolates us from Tao.
The solution lies in floating on the current of Tao, uniting with it. That way we no longer seek to hold or to reject.
“Trouble is a sieve through which we sift our acquaintances.
Those too big to pass through are our friends.”
— Arlene Francis
“They consider me to have sharp and penetrating vision because I see them through the mesh of a sieve.”
— Kahlil Gibran
“The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.” — Buddha
A sieve is a really interesting device. Sometimes you use them to keep things in, sometimes you use them to filter things out. If you’ve been keeping things in for too long, though, the sieve fills up and becomes rather useless, since it’s too full to do its job well. I think of my periods of quiet and meditation as the times when I “dump the sieve”, and let go of all the crap I’ve been collecting. Sometimes I do this with these postings, sometimes, it’s just quiet time or time spent in my garden, or yoga.
I think I’ve always had a pretty fine mesh, really. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t very sensitive, very aware of and filtering pretty much everything that was going on around me through my own mesh of thought. I’ve known so many things about people, both refined and coarse things, that they didn’t think I knew, but since I don’t go spreading those things about, it’s rarely been a problem for me.
The times it has been a problem is when I have seen something coming into someone’s life and tried too hard to filter it out for them. These days I’ve realized I can’t be anyone else’s sieve, only my own. Everyone has to catch the things coming into their own life for themselves. Trying to rescue them rarely works, no matter how good our intentions are. The result of forcing your own sieve into someone else’s stream is typically only a rather sudden splashback that just makes you all wet. And the things you collect can be very difficult to dislodge from your filter when they get stuck. Then you have to have the sieve professionally cleaned, which is very expensive. Sometimes the mesh breaks and has to be repaired, which can take a long time.
And really, why collect all that stuff anyway? Indeed, it’s so much better just to enjoy the flow of the clear, cool current than to get caught up in the rocks and sand.
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