Photo taken in the Jogyesa Temple, South Korea
Preacher Mode
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that at some point in our lives, our parents will find a way to publicly embarrass us. It’s unfortunate, but what can you do about it?
There must be some kind of unbreakable curse that travels from generation to generation that people are doomed to fall under, no matter how much they try to avoid it. We all squirm and cringe at different things.
To one person, all it takes is to see either parent getting loose in the middle of the dance floor. To another, it might take one failed attempt to use any kind of slang phrase so poorly and badly timed, leaving you with an acute physical discomfort that makes you wonder if a small part of you just died inside.
This just happened recently when, upon clearing up our trays at a food court, my dad decided to try out a common saying, uttering the following words out loud: Oh hell no. While he succeeded in saying it correctly, it didn’t make any sense at all.
Because at the moment, nobody was talking. But he seemed focused on squeezing it into the interaction despite the fact that the whole conversation was over, causing my sister and I to burst out laughing.
He shortly joined us, amused at our confusion and my bewildered expression, to which my sister responded, “Let’s just leave it without explanation. It’s funnier like that.” But as silly as this moment was, it pales in comparison to my mom’s innate knack for leading me to abject mortification with seemingly zero effort at all.
Growing up, she had a real talent for this. But before I go on, dear reader, I should give you a bit of context, as it’s important here.
You see, I was raised in a household with two opposites: one who remains a devout believer and one, a skeptic atheist. My mom fits the former.
This meant that on any typical night, you would find her gazing up at the ceiling, her eyes tightly shut in prayer, and my dad watching TV with the volume turned up. As a kid, I had no choice but to accept their differences.
But what I did have a hard time with was her tendency to get lost in preacher mode, finding any way possible to give a sermon on heaven, hell, and eternal damnation to whoever cared enough to listen. No location or social situation could stop her fiery passion and conviction.
If we were at a party, a store, or in the middle of the street, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” as the saying goes, to which I would immediately find something to preoccupy myself with, since these conversations would go on for ages.
I will never forget the moment that sent me spiraling in humiliating agony during one high school graduation dinner when she randomly decided to belt out a classic worship song at the top of her lungs for the entire restaurant to hear. By that age, I wasn’t having it anymore.
I instantly stood up to make a run for it, only to find myself blocked by family and friends howling loudly at my obvious discomfort along the long dining table, deliberately preventing my wanted escape.
Pointing Finger
It should come as no surprise that I refrained from introducing my mother to any significant friend, significant other, significant anything, really, and for a very long time out of fear she’d try to convert them. Thankfully, I can say that she’s toned it down over the years.
While we don’t always see eye to eye, the truth is, I respect her practice because I know how much strength and resilience it’s given her. I think it’s helped me understand how much rituals and traditions mean to people.
In a world with so many viewpoints, it only makes sense to choose the one that speaks to you, keeping you steady and rooted to the earth. But sometimes I wonder if many of these approaches originally led to the same thing.
Sometimes I question if we haven’t been secretly hoodwinked by false misinterpretations and translations, and that in actuality, they all point to the same message; something less about belief and more about reality; something universal like a fundamental truth in its raw form that’s been covered up and buried like a seed that’s been lost over the years.
I don’t know, but it’s a theory I’ve come across time and again, and I have no idea if it’s true. I first came to this insight years ago while meeting a potential student for an interview at a cafe in Prague.
He was a man from an ancient village in China who sought me out to improve his English skills. What was strange was that instead of talking about linguistic areas of improvement, he shifted the conversation to focus on the values and perspective of his tiny rural community.
At that point, it was clear to me that he had no interest in lessons at all; this was the real reason he wanted to meet. Of course, I considered leaving, but decided to stay, curious about what he felt he needed to share with me.
Unlike my mother, he kept it very brief and cut to the chase, which was that he believed that so many of us continue to miss the mark. While using an analogy of people getting so fixated on the “finger pointing at the moon,” he explained how silly we can be to mistake tools, words, and teachings (the finger) for the actual truth.
He argued, “Why do we keep staring at the finger and overlook what it’s pointing to?” To be honest with you, I had zero clue what he was talking about; the whole thing was so weird to me.
He thanked me for my time and quickly left soon after, and I never saw or heard from him again. To this day, I don’t remember his name, but that bizarre moment stayed with me, and I could never have guessed how it had planted something significant that I would later return to in years to come.
According to the ancient proverb, it is written:
“When the sage points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.”
Personal Journey
It’s interesting how the finger doesn’t always take on the same appearance for everyone. People have their own maps, their own tools that work for them.
Rightfully so, just as nobody has the right to force a specific route on others, nobody has the right to block one from exercising their autonomy. Especially since the whole endeavor is so intimate, it belongs to the person himself.
The paths laid out before us are for our own choosing. We get to decide, but it gets me thinking back to the popular philosophical insight.
Are we getting lost in our treasure maps? Are we misleading ourselves with the same logic, comparing who carries the best-looking version and forgetting the actual quest itself?
This reminds me of Paulo Coelho’s philosophical novel, The Alchemist, in which Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd, goes off on an adventure to search for his purpose and destiny in life. He overcomes a series of setbacks and difficulties along the way, going through enormous change in an inner alchemical process where he transforms his earlier fears into wisdom and a new outlook.
In the end, he ends up back where he started, back to his home and to a sycamore tree, under which he finds his buried chest of shiny coins, gold, and precious stones hidden right there all along. This is a beautiful story I’ve come back to over and over again, and I always seem to find something new with every return.
What sticks out to me is Santiago’s realization that the wealth he was looking for was with him from the start. But the journey was necessary for him to reach this understanding.
Sometimes we can get caught up in the things we desperately want and where to find them, only to end up quieting our inner compass and intuition in the process. Maybe it’s less about arriving and more about seeking the courage to set out in the first place.
Maybe the real destination is in the journey itself. In the novel, Coelho writes:
“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”
Common Symbol
Of course, there’s no denying how confusing our maps can be. Sometimes they can appear downright misleading when we fail to use them the right way.
Oftentimes, they can leave us feeling disoriented and overwhelmed, particularly if we don’t realize that we’re scrutinizing them from the wrong angle. Personally, I think this happens because of the amount of symbolism that consequently leads to multiple ways of looking at things.
So much is open to interpretation, and it makes sense why one would toss the whole pursuit altogether in the struggle to find any ounce of value within its labyrinth of uncertainty. But this is exactly why I feel people who think in metaphors and analogies are often misunderstood.
They are not always explicit, but maybe they have a good reason. Perhaps in their efforts to convey something meaningful, the very act of using labels and certainty only activates the part of you that could never understand it; the part of you always looking to judge, attach, and resist anything and everything enough to dilute the very essence of it.
Is it possible that there are some truths that are not meant to be understood but felt? Realized? Experienced?
One common symbol I’ve noticed appearing across many maps are trees. On the surface, it’s easy to see why they effectively represent ideas that relate to their very nature. As powerful pointers of growth, resilience, and renewal, they are the perfect embodiment of the harmony and interconnectedness of the earth and sky.
But while they’ve been repeatedly used to stand for life, they’ve also been used to represent other things. In A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle sheds light on the ramifications of a very different tree, one emphasizing knowledge that generates separation, an obsession with polarity, and the ultimate loss of unity. In the book, he writes:
“When you don’t cover up the world with words and labels, a sense of the miraculous returns to your life that was lost a long time ago when humanity, instead of using thought, became possessed by thought.”
Back to the Garden
Perhaps we can all agree that the worst thing anyone could do is use their definition of something already vastly complex to serve their own self-interest and secret agenda. This is especially dangerous when one fails to recognize the actual meaning of words that require moving beyond technical or conceptual language, beyond thinking itself.
In my experience, the biggest tell that someone is doing this is when they eliminate a significant component of the analogy, the very element that holds it all together in one place. Because, be it a finger, a map, or a tree, a key theme that remains present across all three is the importance of self-direction.
So, as I attempt to build on the abstract brilliance of maybe one of the most misunderstood stories of all time, let’s get something out of the way first. Nobody can force you to believe anything; nobody can force you to look for something you’re genuinely not interested in; nobody can tell you to do, feel, or experience anything without your permission.
That’s the whole point. This is your garden; this is your soil. You are the creator; the choice is yours to do with what you will.
Only you get to decide what exists here and what’s worth growing and expanding in your protective shade. Only you can choose to drop the seed that’s been trampled on for thousands of years.
Your curiosity is yours to follow or ignore at your leisure. So do what you must in your garden; plant what you must.
But labels aside, tree of life or tree of knowledge, I just ask one thing: Can you even see the damn tree? Can you honestly say that you do?
Who are you really, knowledge or the one that carries it? The self-concept, or the one that makes it? The apple, or the tree that bears it?
Isn’t it funny how, in our growing complexity, it is an appreciation of the abstract that might lead us back to simplicity? Is it subjectivity that will return us once and for all to objectivity? Is it possible that paradise is, and always was, a matter of choosing reality?
