A blind turtle lives on the ocean bed and surfaces just once every hundred years. A golden yoke floats on the vast ocean, blown here and there by the wind. What are the chances of the turtle surfacing at just the right time and in just the right place to be able to put its head through the yoke? Our chances of gaining a life of freedom and fortune are just as improbable. You may think it couldn’t possibly be so difficult, but cyclic existence is like a vast and stormy ocean and we are like the turtle that spends most of its time in the depths and only surfaces very occasionally. For most of our lives we have been in bad rebirths and it happens only very rarely that we emerge from these into a good rebirth.
The yoke is made of gold and is therefore heavy, so it often sinks and is invisible. The yoke symbolizes the teachings of an enlightened one. An age of illumination is a period during which an enlightened one has taught in the world and those teachings are still extant, but there are much longer dark periods of time when the world is without such teachings.
Don’t treat the story of the turtle merely as an amusing little fable, but allow it to act as a vivid reminder of how rare your present situation is. There are many good uses to which you can put your human life and when you are conscious of its true value, you will surely wish to choose the very best. What could be better than developing the wish to leave cyclic existence, the altruistic intention to attain enlightenment for the sake of others and the correct understanding of reality?
If we cannot point to anything we have done which has been genuinely constructive for ourselves and others, then from the point of view of the Buddha’s teachings we have wasted our time. And unless we make some changes now, we will probably remain the slaves of our food, clothing, property and social status for the rest of our lives. While these engross us, time passes and life will soon be over. No matter how long we live, we will never find time to practice the Way. In his Letter to a Friend Nagarjuna says:
Many things threaten life, which is even more
Ephemeral than a bubble of water full of air.
How amazing is the opportunity to exhale
After inhaling and to awake from sleep.
The following is an excerpt from a chapter from Alan Watts‘ The Wisdom of Insecurity. He addresses here some fundamental issues about awareness and our insatiable, but wrongheaded, obsession with finding/having “security.” Everything he says applies to all levels of reality…micro/meso/macro.
“THE QUESTION ‘WHAT SHALL WE DO ABOUT IT?’ IS only asked by those who do not understand the problem. If a problem can be solved at all, to understand it and to know what to do about it are the same thing. On the other hand, doing something about a problem which you do not understand is like trying to clear away darkness by thrusting it aside with your hands. When light is brought, the darkness vanishes at once. This applies particularly to the problem now before us. How are we to heal the split between “I” and “me’, the brain and the body, man and nature, and bring all the vicious circles which it produces to an end? How are we to experience life as something other than a honey trap in which we are the struggling flies? How are we to find security and peace of mind in a world whose very nature is insecurity, impermanence, and unceasing change? All these questions demand a method and a course of action. At the same time, all of them show that the problem has not been understood. We do not need action – yet. We need more light.
Light, here, means awareness – to be aware of life, of experience as it is at this moment, without any judgments or ideas about it. In other worlds, you have to see and feel what you are experiencing as it is, and not as it is named. This very simple “opening of the eyes” brings about the mos extraordinary transformation of understanding and living, and shows that many of our most baffling problems are pure illusion. This may sound like an over-simplification because most people imagine themselves to be fully enough aware of the present already, but we shall see that this is far from true.
…. We saw that the questions about finding security and peace of mind in an impermanent wold showed that the problem had not been understood. Before going any further, it must be clear that the kind of security we are talking about is primarily spiritual and psychological. To exist at all, human beings must have a minimum livelihood in terms of food, drink, and clothing – with the understanding, however, that it cannot last indefinitely. But if the assurance of minimum livelihood for sixty years would even begin to satisfy the heart of man, human problems would amount to very little. Indeed, the very reason why we do not have this assurance is that we want so much more than the minimum necessities.
It must be obvious, from the start, that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. if I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I,” but it is just the feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other worlds, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.
To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.
We look for this security by fortifying and enclosing ourselves in innumerable ways. We want the protection of being “exclusive” and “special,” seeking to belong to the safest church, the best nation, the highest class, the right set, and the “nice” people. These defenses lead to divisions between us, and so to more insecurity demanding more defenses. Of course it is all done in the sincere belief that we are trying to do the right things and living the best ways; but this, too, is a contradiction.
I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I ” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.
We can hardly begin to consider this problem unless it is clear that the craving for security is itself a pain and a contradiction, and that the more we pursue it, the more painful it becomes. This si true in whatever form security may be conceived.
You want to be happy, to forget yourself, and yet the more you try to forget yourself, the more you remember the self you want to forget. you want to escape from pain, but the more you struggle to escape, the more you inflame the agony. You are afraid and want to be brave, but the effort to be brave is fear trying to run away from itself. You want peace of mind, but eh attempt to pacify it is like trying to clam the waves with a flat-iron.
We are all familiar with this kind of vicious circle in the form of worry. We know that worrying is futile, but we go on doing it because calling it futile does not stop it. We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe. Yet it is perfectly useless to say that we should not want to be safe. Calling a desire bad names doesn’t get rid of it. What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it – we shall see that we do not want it at all. No one has to tell you that you should not hold your breath for ten minutes. You know that you can’t do it, and that the attempt is most uncomfortable.
The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security. One of the worst vicious circles is the problem of the alcoholic. In very many cases he knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that, for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor. And yet he drinks. For , dislike it as he may, the experience of not drinking is worse. It gives him the “horrors,” for he stands face to face with the unveiled, basic insecurity of the world.
Herein lies the crux of the matter. To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it. It is like the Persian story of the sage who came to the door of Heaven and knocked. From within the voice of God asked, ” Who is there” and the sage answered, “It is I.” ” In this House, ” replied the voice, “there is no room for thee and me.” So the sage went away, and spent many years pondering over this answer in deep meditation. Returning a second time, the voice asked the same question, and again the sage answered, “It is I.” The door remained closed. After some years he returned for the third time, and, as his knocking, the voice once more demanded, “Who is there?” And the sage cried, “It is thyself!” The door was opened.
To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitioriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being which we call “I.” For this we think to be the real man – the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, and the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this “I” does not exit.
“How does one bring oneself into accord with it [the Tao]?” “If you try to accord with it, you will get away from it”. For to imagine there is a “you” separate from life which somehow has to accord with life is to fall straight into the trap. If you try to find the Tao, you are at once presupposing a difference between yourself and the Tao.” —Alan Watts, Become What You Are. This divide between our daily life and the natural world has grown so much that most of us don’t know where the food we eat every day comes from and feel out of place in the silence and vastness of open, cementless spaces， and how each of us are connected together in this web of universe.