c. 2004 Religion News Service

 (Les Kaye is the abbot of Kannon Do Zen Meditation Center in Mountain View, Calif., and author of “Zen at Work.” He is the founder of Meditation at Work, an awareness training program for businesses.)

(UNDATED) “You take the high road and I’ll take the low road/ And I’ll be in Scotland before you,/ For me and my true love may never meet again. …”

The ancient Scottish ballad suggests more than a young man’s heartbreak over the loss of his sweetheart. It reflects a universal lament for the seeming disappearance of a fundamental attribute of life. The apparent absence is replaced by a yearning so deep that life is diminished by an unremitting distress for what has been lost, a constant quest for the road home.

We want the feeling of being on the “high road”: complete, secure, embraced by the world, and confident of our future. And we want clarity about the meaning of life and our role in it.

But it is a characteristic of the modern world that much _ perhaps most _ of humanity feels disoriented, as if having emerged from the subway into the shadows of a strange neighborhood. We have a sense of being on the “low road,” without recall of how we arrived. We yearn to return to the “high road.”

Yet the actual truth is that we have never left the high road. It’s just that we don’t know it. Allowing ourselves to be distracted and misled by our own desires, we misread the world we live in. Not recognizing the spiritual side of ourselves that Buddhists call True Nature, we feel that something is missing, that we are lost in unfamiliar territory.

The distractions of the modern world are intense, accelerated by skilled advertising. Alluring pictures of attractive commodities make very seductive promises. And we are vulnerable, susceptible to the promises, thinking, “These things will satisfy my empty feeling and I will be on the high road.” Our problem is failure to recognize the source of our confusion: perceptions of reality and life distorted by desire for material and emotional things.

We become spiritually ill when we feel entitled to possess whatever the everyday world promises. Feeling entitled to be “high” and on the high road, we are an easy mark for disappointment and suffering.

When we do not feel high we feel as if we are unfulfilled. Dissatisfied, we seek the quick fix, the commodity that will make us high, not knowing that we are already on the high road, already fulfilled. Our not knowing is the “low road,” the basis of our delusion.

The true high road is not about feeling high. Rather, it is resting in satisfaction with the world we are in, with what we already have, unconcerned for what we do not have.

Avoiding the artificial while embracing and being embraced by the real, the natural, in our everyday world _ moonlight, rain, forests, bird songs, oranges, decaying leaves, lizards _ takes us to the high road, as Willa Cather shows us in “My Antonia”:

“The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. … I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy.”

Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.

At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

The good news is that each of us has the capacity for this embrace. But it is not automatic. It requires an effort to soften the mind so that it can recognize and accept reality. This is the role of contemplative spiritual practice: enabling our intellectual machinery to relax its grip on mental images and fixed ideas so that anxieties can lose their intensity.

With continuous practice, so much is revealed about desires, dependencies and the lure of artificial promises. It discloses the road we think we are on and how we create it. Our encounter with our imagined low road leads us to the high road, providing the chance to explore unexplored and scary places _ the mental back alleys, dead ends and side streets between the monuments and edifices we conceive with our yearnings. It is the basis of spiritual practice, if we are willing to make the effort.

Facing the low road with determination _ facing ourself _ is itself the high road.

Delusions are always with us. Yet, keeping spiritual practice alive in the midst of ever recurring desires shows us how the “low road” is none other than the “high road.” To see life as a single road is to return home at every step.

DEA/JL END KAYE