Eat, Pray, Love

Prayer.” For some people, that’s truly enough. For others, more drastic measures are re-
quired.
And now I will mention my friend the dairy farmer from Ireland—on the surface, a most un-
likely character to meet in an Indian Ashram. But Sean is one of those people like me who
were born with the itch, the mad and relentless urge to understand the workings of existence.
His little parish in County Cork didn’t seem to have any of these answers, so he left the farm
in the 1980s to go traveling through India, looking for inner peace through Yoga. A few years
later, he returned home to the dairy farm in Ireland. He was sitting in the kitchen of the old
stone house with his father—a lifelong farmer and a man of few words—and Sean was telling
him all about his spiritual discoveries in the exotic East. Sean’s father listened with mild in-
terest, watching the fire in the hearth, smoking his pipe. He didn’t speak at all until Sean said,
“Da—this meditation stuff, it’s crucial for teaching serenity. It can really save your life. It
teaches you how to quiet your mind.”
His father turned to him and said kindly, “I have a quiet mind already, son,” then resumed
his gaze on the fire.
But I don’t. Nor does Sean. Many of us don’t. Many of us look into the fire and see only in-
ferno. I need to actively learn how to do what Sean’s father, it seems, was born know-
ing—how to, as Walt Whitman once wrote, stand “apart from the pulling and hauling...
amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary... both in and out of the game and
watching and wondering at it all.” Instead of being amused, though, I’m only anxious. Instead
of watching, I’m always probing and interfering. The other day in prayer I said to God,
“Look—I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could
someday have an unexamined lunch?”
Buddhist lore has a story about the moments that followed the Buddha’s transcendence
into enlightenment. When—after thirty-nine days of meditation—the veil of illusion finally fell
away and the true workings of the universe were revealed to the great master, he was repor-
ted to have opened his eyes and said immediately, “This cannot be taught.” But then he
changed his mind, decided that he would go out into the world, after all, and attempt to teach
the practice of meditation to a small handful of students. He knew there would be only a mea-
ger percentage of people who would be served by (or interested in) his teachings. Most of hu-
manity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never
see the truth, no matter who tries to help them. A few others (like Sean’s Da, perhaps) are so
naturally clear-eyed and calm already that they need no instruction or assistance whatsoever.
But then there are those whose eyes are just slightly caked with dust, and who might, with the
help of the right master, be taught to see more clearly someday. The Buddha decided he
would become a teacher for the benefit of that minority—“for those of little dust.”