A FINGER POINTING TO THE MOON
72Siberian Snow
Living in these crazy days
Running and spinning out of control
It’s like living in a daze
The world has become a twisted reflection
Of what it once was
Behind a haze
The shade of Siberian snow
War and conflict on distant shores
And here at home
The ideals and labor of my forefathers
Cast into the abyss
By their children
Who throw them like skipping stones
How far can we go
Before the point of no return
How much more pain and destruction
Can we endure and inflict
Before Heaven will cast us out
Like a large ugly stone
Out into the Siberian snow.
-1989-
A Finger Pointing To The Moon
Maybe it is because I have been a martial artist for almost my entire life that I am a fan of Bruce Lee. If you do not know who Bruce Lee was, climb back under your rock and contemplate the fact that you may very well be the only person on the planet who does not know the legend of Bruce Lee.
He was an extraordinary human being. Most people only know of him from his Kung Fu motion pictures of the early 1970’s. He was a spectacular martial artist, the real deal, not the product of stunt men and special effects departments. He was truly a master of his art.
What many people do not realize about him is that he was also a philosopher. Mr. Lee majored in philosophy at the University Of Washington. He was an accomplished author of not only martial arts philosophy but also philosophical ideologies regarding living in the modern world. He was a great man who unfortunately left this life far too soon. The world is both a better place because he was here and it is a lesser place because he is no longer here.
One of my favorite Bruce Lee philosophies is: “It is like a finger pointing the way to the moon…do not concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”
When I ponder this philosophy I think about all the various religions that most of us follow in one fashion or another. We are a very complex group of individuals. We are influenced by our religious beliefs, education, our nationality, our ethnicity, our sex, our political views, the mass media, the environment, are you getting the picture? We are all this and more. We are so complex that we had to find or create all the major and minor world religions just so we can come to some understanding and comprehension of God and his relationship with us. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, New Age, Native/Aboriginal, the list goes on and on. Even within each of the religious groups are individual sects that exist. It really is amazing that so many differing methods of belief and religious practice exist yet, they all point back to a common ideal.
The danger in all this is that we become so entrenched in our religion or philosophy that we lose sight of the value and beauty of what others around us believe. Every religion claims to be “The One.” You know, you have heard it yourself. They all claim to be the bearer of THE TRUTH.
What if by some small chance they are all correct? What if all these groups happen to be the bearers of the truth? What if the truth that we all have this instinctive urge to pursue is so large that it is beyond our ability to comprehend? Perhaps, over the millennia of human existence, the great universal truth has been dissected into smaller truths and those truths scattered amongst humanity to every corner of our world. Suppose that these truths were gathered together throughout history and compiled and organized and just suppose that this is how eventually the many religions and philosophies grew and evolved into what they are today.
Our individual religious beliefs can become so encompassing that we lose sight of the value all other beliefs. We even go to the point of waging war on our fellow human beings because we believe that our God is more powerful than their God. Almost every violent war that has been waged has been justified, by man, in the name of his God. Even in today’s modern world, these wars rage on.
That is the danger of myopic study, and belief. Not just in religion but in politics, education, and interpersonal relationships. We are willing to sacrifice other truths that exist in the world by nullifying their existence or importance. I am a Christian; my beliefs hold the same value to me as a Muslim’s beliefs do for him. One is of no greater importance or value than the other. They are but pieces of truths that circumscribe a greater whole. The fact is that we need each other and it is time to stop focusing on the small cracks that separate and differentiate us and begin to see the things that are so similar that at times the individual religious views become so alike that it is hard to tell the difference of one faith from another.
We are all more alike than we may choose to believe. We are all striving for the same ideal. We are more than Jew, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or Agnostic. We are human beings, we are complex and different and at the same time we are the same.
Our view becomes so focused and narrow that we just stare at the finger pointing to the moon and we miss all that heavenly glory.
