Herbert V Guenther - 1983 - Looking Deeper - A Swans Questions and Answers (58p).pdf

Herbert V Guenther - 1983 - Looking Deeper - A Swans Questions and Answers (58p).pdf

Paperback: 51 pages
Publisher: Timeless Books (March 1989)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0931454093
ISBN-13: 978-0931454097

This is a poem by the 14th century Buddhist practitioner Longchenpa (the same author as "Kindly bent to Ease Us"). The author has great knowledge of kavya (ornate poetry) and alamkara (poetic ornamentation) which he demonstrates in this poem. If you are familiar with Dandin's Kavyadarsha, you'll know what I'm talking about.

If you don't know what I'm talking about … well, you could just try reading it as a poetic narrative. The author's intro and commentary are vaguely interesting and sporadically useful.

From the author's introduction:
Throughout the ages there have been people, albeit a few only,
who, dissatisfied with the commonplace, the mechanistic everyday­ life credo, have been striving for higher levels of awareness, for quality of life and for meaning as a non-mechanistic dynamic pers­ pective. Such striving does not aim at fixation and rigidity, nor is it concerned with reducing man to a model of predictable behavior "beyond freedom and dignity." Its aim has been, and always will be, understanding reality by being "in tune" with it and interpreting the information pouring into us in the light of enhanced value and pertinence. This dynamic process certainly cannot be equated with becoming absorbed in a static All or subordinated to pre-established deterministic myths which deprive man of his specific humanness. Rather, this striving is an ever active expression of the as yet unartic­ ulated conviction that man shares in an evolutionary process which is not tied to any particular system or species. Such a conviction carries with it a sense of fearlessness which prevents one from "opting out" by running away from oneself in the futile attempt to merge in a world of things. Therefore a person who strives is by virtue of his striving already an "outsider,"he does not fit into the amorphous and anonymous majority of mankind with its petty "individualism," the evocative euphemism for the impersonal mode which governs the life of the masses and which epitomizes cultural and spiritual stagnation, its abysmal hollowness being camouflaged by the cacophonous rhe­ toric of a fundamentalist religion as we)) as political fanaticism.