The Gap Between the Six Worlds and the Seventh, Cont.

If he has developed serious problems with alcohol, drugs or other self-destructive behaviors, family, friends, TV pitchmen and an even greater variety of social workers will up-scale their efforts to rescue him again. All sorts of samsaric tourniquets will be applied to his hemorrhaging ego. TV pitchmen will now direct him to private 'hospitals' guaranteed to restore his dignity, a quality they will ignore when his insurance runs out. Friends will wax empathetic, "There but for the grace of God go I," until the floundering man becomes an obnoxious dinner guest or is crass enough to ask for a loan or a letter of recommendation on personal stationery - requests that in the best of times can be fatal to a relationship. (At this point friends usually reappraise their stores of grace and pronounce him quite worthy of a hellward plunge.) Families will reconsider the bonds of blood. The soft bosom of filial love ("Son, we're with you every step of the way back") will likely harden into a steel breastplate should Sonny stumble or go into reverse ("Your Mother and I don't care what you stick in your nose just so you don't do it in or near the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.") Social workers will persist in their efforts after all others have ceased to acknowledge the fallen man's existence. No matter how terrible a client's life upon the Wheel has been, a zealous case worker will try to haul him back for more.

Some people who return to Samsara may achieve a measure of reintegration. Some will stay cured for longer than two weeks. But many, deciding that Samsaric cures are worse than Swamp diseases, will re-enter the Swamp once again. Off the wagon. Off the deep end. Back and forth. Lost and 'rescued' until their ruination is complete.

(3). A man may turn neither to the Mountain nor to the Wheel. Blind and deaf to anything but his own interior battles, he may perish in the waters, at once the slayer and the slain.

Uchiyama Roshi of Japan's Antaiji Temple likes to describe this self-destruction as a situation which starts with the man drinking the saki, then after awhile becomes the saki drinking the saki, and finally ends with the saki drinking the man. And so it is with a variety of drugs, legal and illegal, which start by promising to liberate a man from his troubles and end by worsening his troubles and killing him in the process.

It is sad to note that those who express an interest in finding sanctuary in religion never receive encouragement from the folks up on the Wheel. No one in Samsara ever advises an egowounded man to seek religious treatment for his injuries.

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