What Gets in the Way
Five teachings on the obstacle, which turns out not to be where you were looking for it.
Every tradition on the Map agrees that something stands between you and the ground the first course described, and every tradition agrees, with a kind of weary humor, that it is not where you would look. It is not in the world. It is not a lack of information. It is closer in than that, and it is usually made of things you were given and never thought to examine.
This course names five of them, in order of how near they sit. The words you were taught to think in. The appearance you took for the whole. The account you inherited without signing. Your own reach, which is a gift and a danger in equal measure. And, last, the habit of deciding what a thing means before it has finished happening. None of these is a sin. The traditions are not scolding. They are pointing at a set of very old, very ordinary mistakes, and they are doing it because the mistakes come off, once seen.
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III.1The trap and the fishZhuangzi says the first veil is the words themselves.The Fish Trap — Words and the Meaning They Carry · Zhuangzi, “External Things” (Chapter 26)
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III.2The set mistaken for the playMaya is not that the world is unreal. It is that the appearance got taken for the whole.Lila — The Divine Play · Vedanta; Alan Watts, The Two Hands of God
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III.3The bill you did not signThe Hebrew prophets revoke a law inside their own scripture, and keep both versions.The Fathers Have Eaten Sour Grapes · Exodus 34:6–7 (JPS 1917); Deuteronomy 24:16, Ezekiel 18, Jeremiah 31:29–30 (KJV); Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 24a
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III.4Between the twoOvid’s Daedalus gives two warnings, and the proverb kept only one.Icarus — Fly Between the Two · Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII
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III.5The verdict that never comesA frontier farmer loses a horse, and the story refuses to end where the proverb does.The Old Man Lost His Horse · Huainanzi, ch. 18, “In the World of Man”
Five veils, and none of them was out in the world. Words, appearances, inheritance, reach, and the reflex to grade. The traditions did not hand you a list of enemies. They handed you a list of habits, and the strange news is that habits, unlike enemies, come off when they are looked at long enough.
You will not have dropped any of them by the end of the week. That is not what the course is for. It is for the moment, some ordinary afternoon, when you catch one in the act and recognize it. The next course is about what to do with your hours in the meantime, because seeing the obstacle is not the same as moving it.