We are searching, mixing it with human attitudes and platitudes, and yet it is still a worthwhile journey to undertake. What is awakening?

You are reading this Fellowship magazine, because you are searching. That has a value in itself and shows that you have started questioning ordinary life and your place in it.

It is impossible to explain sleep if you have never seen yourself asleep. It is devastating to see oneself lost. But most of all it is wonderful to see oneself knowing and understanding all of this, understanding that this is called awakening. I invite you to accept your shortcomings, not to ponder in your darkest hours, but to embrace the words of a titan in the search for consciousness.

Walt Whitman: “I resist anything better than my own diversity.”  

What kind of presence can we create as men number four?  How high can we go?

A silly question at first sight. You might recall the classification of different men in The Search of the Miraculous, talking about sleeping people. Only does a man number four start to understand that there is another world beyond. 

These are all philosophical and theoretical questions and have nothing to do with our daily life. I experience my machine – another word for a regular human being – as stuffed with opinions, judging, evaluating and ready to give a quick review of all the learned opinions.

Men number four are between two chairs. We are quick to complain, quick to lament our friction. But in the end, we start towards awakening. There is something within us, an aspect of feeling uneasy, not believing the thoughts.

The human body dies. Wealth and fame drift away, like the petal of a rose. I was always touched, visiting my mother in her nursing home, seeing professors, scholars, and business leaders reduced to their pitiful human existence.

I keep reciting the famous poet Rumi for my own safe-keeping:

If you could not feel
tenderness and hurt. 

If you could live in the poorhouse of non-wanting 
and never be indignant. 

If you could take two steps away from the beautiful one 
you want so much to lie down with. 

If you could trust there’s a spirit-wife 
for you somewhere, a whole harem of wives, 
a nest, a jewel-setting where 
when you sit down, you know 
you’ve always wanted to be. 

If you could quit living here and go, there. 
If you could remember clearly what you’ve done. 

But strong hooks hold you in this wind. 
So many people love you, 
you mix with the color and smell and taste of surroundings. 

Champion lovemaker and leader of men! 
You can’t give up your public fascination, 
or your compassion for the dying. 

There’s another compassion you don’t know yet, 
but you may, when griefs disappear. 

It’s a place, 
with no questioning thorns in the pasture grass. 

If you could remember you’re not a crow, 
but the mystic osprey that never needs to light, 
you could be walking there 
with Shams.

I wish you a diverse 2021.

Klaus Labuttis has been a practitioner of the Fourth Way for four decades.