The Eternal Battle Between the Light and Dark
The story tells of a fight between a white dog and a black dog. There are many variations of this story, but the Buddha Field version held that the fight represents our struggle with the mind. [The Christian version of this story labels it as "the good in us" and "the evil in us".] The point of the story was that whichever dog you want to win, feed that one and don't feed the other one (so it will be weaker and lose the fight.) I understood that the black dog was supposed to be "the mind" but I never really knew what the white dog was supposed to be. Was it supposed to be meditation, or our true selves? No, because neither of those things is involved in a struggle. So I think we must never have really addressed that and, as usual, focussed on the mind and defeating that.
In any case, I thought I needed to explain that analogy before you read Clay's email:
After twelve years I left the Buddha Field two years ago. I had spent most of the time within the community in a ‘Holy war’ to starve and kill the ‘black dog’ called my ego. My own war was a microcosm of the many ‘In the name of truth’ religious based wars on our planet that have existed without abeyance for thousands of years.
During the past two years I have begun to make true peace with my humanity. I no longer see it as something in opposition to my spiritual nature but instead an integral part of my divine expression. I am a divine being experiencing myself in a physical way for no reason other than the joy of the ride. In embracing the ride with love I am truly meeting myself for the first time. I am spirit and I have always been spirit. There is no getting back to something that I have never left!
My nature is love. In the act of denying my humanity and labeling it a ‘black dog’ that requires starvation I placed much of my human experience outside love. The very act of doing so fragmented me and created the very separation that I was seeking to heal. What I called love was not love. It was conditional and was based on spiritual ideas of up and down, high and low.
I like to use the following analogy. If you take a dog and shut it in the closet under the stairs because you feel its behavior is not appropriate it will probably end up howling. It may end up distracting you from your meditation in the room across the hall. Instead of loving my dog I saw it as a howling monster that was standing between me and God! My dog even escaped his closet a few times and I had to spend days chasing him around the house. He would bite me when I got too close! I would then shout at him, “See… I am right… I need to lock you up, ignore you and starve you until you die!” Needless to say there was a bit of a rift between myself and my dog. I felt that if I could keep him locked up long enough he would eventually pass away and I would be free. There would even be moments when he would stop howling and I would experience peace within my meditation. In reality the more I attempted to starve my dog the more fragmented I became.
I have since let my dog out from his confines within the closet. I have to say he was a little upset with me… and that’s an understatement! Love was my response. I held him and let him bite and bark. I kept holding him. I did not judge his expression. I just loved him. I no longer held him to ideas of spiritual appropriateness. I just loved him.
In loving him he has become my friend. He is part of who I am. He is my divine creative expression in our physical world. He is spirit. I am spirit. He sits at the feet of our spiritual nature. We laugh and play together. He barks with excitement at the joy of being alive! We are connected. Our nature is love.
