A Japanese Zen monk sought out a hermit on a mountain and asked him for help with his physical ailment. The old man (reputed to be hundreds of years old) first pretended he was an ignorant mountain man who knew nothing about mind or healing. But he finally relented and told him about the soft butter method. It went something like the following.
First, imagine you have placed a lump of soft butter as big as a duck egg on your head. It slowly melts over your hair, face, and head. It goes over your eyes, your nose, and inside your head. It touches your tongue and glides over your throat and then your heart. You can smell its fine fragrance, and its warmth wraps around your chest. It continues to melt. You hear a water-dripping sound in the background. Your heart is moving down the chest with the melted butter. It moistens your shoulders and muscles, as well as your liver and stomach. It continues to the lower regions of your body. All the time, all the undesirable accumulations and sickness in your body melt away with the butter …
Love is not a problem. Attachment is. If you love something or someone with the full understanding that the end is final, that attachment is futile, and it blinds and confuses you, then that love is soothing, undisturbed, forgiving, and it both cleanses and renews.
Even loving your body is natural if that love does not suffocate, frighten, or cause you to hold on unduly.
Even a Zen monk or a hermit can love their body. There is nothing inherently wrong or inconsistent about that.
This is love without attachment.
On the other hand, attachment causes rage—rage against fate, reality, and oneself.
It is to be expected. For consciousness to be consciousness, which is without judgment, it cannot and will not attach.
The soft butter method is less about melting than hugging or embracing. (As warm, fragrant butter courses through you, it is as though every part of you is gradually embraced.)
To be, in the end, cut off from this life is hard to bear. To love but not to attach—is that not an oxymoron? Or maybe it isn’t like that at all. Maybe we are looking at this all wrong. This life, however pleasing and wonderful it had been, is not meant to be the destination.
Or maybe we should entertain the idea that we are not really who we think we are. We all are a manifestation of consciousness, from which we have sprung and to which we will return. Consciousness may well be the timeless bog. But what do I know? All I know is that I have this stillness within me that I suspect has to do with my origin. It is not stillness like a point. Instead, it is a vast cave.
While a lizard cannot experience our music or metaphysical insights, we cannot feel the magic in a drop of moisture like a small lizard would. Such is the magic of consciousness. It is great wherever it finds itself, be it in the form of a reptile, a tree, or even a rock.
I wrote the following story a long time ago about the transmigration of the soul of a man into a lizard (in the Natural Trajectory of Human Consciousness):
“His consciousness is in an odd place between living and dying. He can still recall his life as a man, though only in the barest of outlines. While his mind still struggles to take in his new reality, his gecko body already fully accepts it.
“He moves up to the drop of moisture and rolls out his tongue. How little his body weighs now. He is pleased with that. It’s so light it is almost like not having a body. This isn’t quite the liberation he had envisioned, but the weight shed is real. The taste on his tongue—the coolness, a crispness that is long and pointed—appears to have pierced him. His tiny lizard brain lights up at that point, and he sees what he never saw before as a human. He knows what water truly is simply by imbibing it. Whatever he feels goes deep inside him, but the outside too is now open to him. What is inside and out is no longer clearly demarcated.
“He muses: Have I always been a lizard under the human skin?
“The water on his tongue continues to penetrate his senses. That and the various scents he picks up are demolishing his mind, and he can no longer hold on to the thin film of humanness over his primitive lizard mind. And just like that, all of humanity slips away, together with all its history and achievements, as well as any last traces of ugliness and tenderness. All gone, except for the trees and the grass and the lizards and the dreams. All that’s left are senses and dreams of senses, which are eminently changeable in this poorly defined and beautiful world. A strange and mysterious world into which we all have been cast without reprieve.”
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