The First Great Question is Where am I? Unless we can learn to respond to this question with the Truth, we can never hope to transcend our pain and suffering, we will never create a sustainable and compassionate human community.
“We had an acute sense of the impermanence of the presence, and a haunting understanding that we were living for a time in a strange borderland between the real and the unreal, without enough knowledge of the country to tell one from the other. The daily routine, in study hall and classroom, was real enough, certainly; but so was the great flood of moonlight that sometimes lay on the countryside at night, turning the plain gravel road south into a white highway that wound through enchanted meadows across hills that might not be there at all when daylight returned. The reality of daily routine was going to vanish in a little while, and then it would be no more tangible than the Neverland that bordered the moonlit roadway. Would memory be any more reliable than imagination? When both are forever out of reach, does what you once were count for more than what you once thought you might be? We live in dreams, and while we can we might as well make them pleasant ones.”[i]
See the supplemental reading for more on impermanence.
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Supplemental Reading: Impermanence, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
#69 The Real and the Unreal
[i] Catton, Bruce. “A Michigan Boyhood.” American Heritage. August 1972, p. 93.
