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FACE TO FACE | EASTERN HORIZON 49

inform us how the education at NTI has inspired them So, please allow me to end with two quotes. First
to serve as bodhisattvas of a troubled world. is an extract from “Go to the Limits of Your
Longing,” a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:
What’s your parting words of advice for us during
this Covid-19 pandemic so that we can maintain “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
peace and calm in our daily lives? Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

I wonder how many people lived in peace and calm pre- Yes, no feeling is final – Covid has taught us that no
Covid? In The Symbolic Life, Swiss psychiatrist and mutation is final and so, we cannot expect to abide
psychoanalyst, Carl Jung writes, by any form or feeling. Finally, an extract from David
Whyte’s “Coleman’s Bed”:
“it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine,
not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man “Live in this place
himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the as you were meant to and then,
simple reason that there is no adequate protection surprised by your abilities,
against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more become the ancestor of it all,

devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.” the quiet, robust and blessed Saint
that your future happiness
The pandemic is reshaping how we live and work and will always remember.”
how we relate to one another. We are working from
home, schooling our children from home, and attending Take heart that you are always sowing the seeds of your
funerals from home. As restrictions ease, there is a future happiness. Have faith in your quiet, robust, and
lot of uncertainty and anxiety building up but also blessed Buddha nature! EH
opportunities. It is the perfect time for us to build a
culture of care based on our intrinsic Buddha nature so
that we do not let psychic epidemics take over our lives.