Afterward he nodded, and then humbly requested that his own stanza be chalked next to it. That includes both the good and the neurotic. We can look at any period in history, from the golden age of Greece to our current techno-marvellous era and we will find grand concepts of liberty, democracy and loving kindness, which we applaud. And simultaneously we will find other concepts that justify slavery, ethnic and gender discrimination, economic exploitation and acquisitive materialism, which we abhor. But spirit lives neither in the concepts we approve nor in the ones we disapprove.
Concepts are the mirror.
Only when we can look through the mirror do we get an unobstructed view of spirit, and spirit, in turn, can reach out and touch our hearts and heads and hands. Spirit is not something that must be attained. It is already here, inside each of us as fully developed as can be. The only difficulty is that our egos have covered it over with the mirror of our projections - our ideas about who we are, what others expect of us, what we believe in and what we don't believe in. Maintain an enquiring mind and an earnest search into the depths of one's own nature.