"Okay, yes. Thanks." I was looking around at the sidewalk, the buildings, the lamp-posts; everything seemed to emit a subtle light. We passed a tiny garden in which the low bushes seemed to present themselves, calling out for attention, for acknowledgement. I smiled at them and said Hi, under my breath.
An elderly man in a worn coat was walking slowly ahead of us. As we moved past him, I glanced at his profile, trying to see inside. I could feel invisible walls and a dull, irritable tiredness, a readiness to be annoyed. I thought, if only it were possible to stop him and say something like, "Dear sir, just open your eyes and look around you; it's an incredible world!
Don't close yourself off from all the life and beauty around you!"
I had been basking no longer than a few seconds in my own niceness and wisdom when a piece of information shoved itself at me and I suddenly knew that, first, the man needed his walls just exactly where they were, and didn't want to be rescued from them. Second, that it was not my right, not anyone's right, to tell him that there was another way to live, a better way to be, to urge him to see or hear what he didn't choose to see or hear. It was his choice to live the way he was living, and I must not make the mistake of passing judgment on the conduct of a life I knew nothing about.
Oh, boy. Just got slapped.
I remembered my mother telling me that there is a basic rule in spiritual matters: never offer what the other person hasn't asked for. Her phrase was, "Wait until you get the question before you volunteer the answer."
I thought about all the books - millions of books all over the world - in which human beings in many places and times had written about the human psyche, about life and death and the nature of God, and of how few people read them. I thought, how many people have taken peyote? I've heard lots of people talk about Huxley and his mescaline experience, wishing they could explore the way he did, have that kind of adventure, but how many of them actually go looking for mescaline or peyote to try it themselves? Most people hold onto the familiar. Who wants to actually risk having his universe changed? I do. Me.
