The Greeks say the gods love to
travel in disguise. In Greek folk tradition, it’s good policy to be nice to
strangers, and to pay attention to what they say, because you never know what
is traveling behind their masks.
On a visit to England , I landed at Heathrow airport on a
redeye flight, exhausted and burdened with financial worries. I was carrying
too much baggage, and had to wrestle an oversize suitcase down the steps to the
Underground.
As I collapsed onto a seat on the train, a roly-poly man,
bearded like Santa Claus, winked at
me from the seat opposite. He said with a broad grin, “The Buddha says – Walk
on the bridge, don’t build on it.”
The words slapped me in the face. They stung me awake. They
were exactly what I needed to hear. Caught up in my immediate worries, stressed
out and overtired, I had been forgetting one of the secrets of living the
Incredible Journey: it’s the journey,
not the destination, that counts.
The stranger on the London Tube was an example of how we
play everyday angels – even gods in disguise -for each other. The
Buddha-quoting Santa figure reminds me that there is a provocative Buddhist
text on this theme. In the version translated by Thomas Cleary, it is titled Entry into the Realm of Reality. It
describes how authentic spiritual teachers – even the greatest who walk this
earth – can appear in any guise, as an exotic dancer or as a monk, as a
panhandler or a king, as a scholar or a warrior.
We are most likely to run into them when we are in motion,
especially when we are crossing a border into unfamiliar territory, when strong
emotions are in play, and when we are facing the greatest challenges.
Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.
Picture: from London Transport Museum
