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De is the Chinese character for virtue and, as stated by luminary Lonny Jarrett ‘implies bypassing the mind to know truth with the heart’. This statement strikes me as uber-profound, and what comes to mind is the picture of the 5 elements in our student clinic at school with the adage below ‘Virtue is the Essence’; something I feel so close to my heart that every time I see it I feel as though my heart has been struck like a gong at a monastery, signalling the beginning of a most sacred occasion. So often in our Western, materialistic societies, where our most basic survival needs are not only met entirely but we enjoy options that, again as Lonny illuminated to us over the workshop, emperors of millennia of yore could not even dream about, we tend to get ‘suffocated in our own minds’. Truth has become very much an intellectual affair, as denoted by the relentless rambling of universities, the information overload of the internet and the media etc. etc…and yet as I rode the subway home tonight and read these words, I realized that the most enduring and eternal truths I have ever learned had come to me not by something I had read but by something I had done. It suddenly dawned upon me how impoverished I was, still stumbling on in my studies of Chinese medicine and shamanism, still reading spiritual text after spiritual text, while my being was left inside to ‘suffocate’ under all this…hesitation? Was that it? I apprehended a heavy feeling within me, akin to dread…hmph…Was I simply an information glutton, using my forever seeking as a coping mechanism for my much deeper fear of finding and doing?? Was I destined to arrive suddenly at middle-age, sure with many, many more concepts to boot and intellectual propensities; a much more interesting human specimen for certain but a more virtuous one?  I wasn’t sure. I became scared in that moment, as I realized how easily it was to fall asleep in life and still believe one was carrying on to the best of their abilities. But it was not so. I felt suddenly the horror of civilization around me: the endless hedonism intrinsic to a consumerist society that offered satiation of every desire at a moment’s notice. I saw around me, and within me, the unmotivated, deadened, benumbed, will-less human automaton; living the same day constantly over and over, with a few nuances here and there, but really all the same…I had some notion of truth and yet I knew that the most truthful people, the ones I loved the most, Gandhi, Jesus, MLK, had become so beautiful by their endless sacrifice to humanity, to action….
 


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