‘In long-term spiritual practice, we can find ourselves in this sort of terribly humbling situation. We have been going along feeling quite please with our spiritual progress. When we scan the horizon, there is nothing in sight that we have not dealt with. In the whole three hundred and sixty degrees of our egocentric conditioning, we have seen it all, we have worked our way through it, piece by piece. We must be finished! And the next thing we know, we are flattened with the same piece of suffering that drove us to spiritual practice in the first place. Now we are stuck in hell and absolutely powerless to do anything about it. All we can do is hang on and pray we survive…
Each time I get slammed with my conditioning, I am so very grateful that it is the same thing over and over again. I would be in big trouble if every time it was something I had never encountered before. It is a good system: one life, one set of karmic conditioning.’ (Sweet Zen)
I can vouch for this!
Shundo David Haye 