"The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
-- William Blake
Once when I was talking with a swami from the kundalini yoga tradition, he asked me about a book that I was reading. I showed him the book, which was about Theravadan Buddhist meditation teachers. He looked at their pictures and remarked, "They all look like dried up leaves, about to blow away." And he was right! Each of the masters of this most austere school of Buddhism had a crispy, pinched look about them, as if they were dehydrated and hadn't had nearly enough fiber in their diets. They were not light and juicy. There was surely no excess in them, or in their lives. The balance of the middle way had rendered them damn near lifeless!
Excess shakes things up. It blows out the cobwebs, destroys routine and helps us see the world anew. As Krishnamurti was so fond of pointing out, habit dulls. It's nice to have a daily meditation practice that takes you deeper. But beware! The practice can easily become a small and comfortable fenced-in yard for your soul. Of course, even meditation can be practiced to excess, like the biblical injunction to "pray without ceasing," or the Tibetan practice of taking a three year, three month, three week, three day retreat, and thus lead to Blake's "palace of wisdom!"
The other way in which excess induces wisdom is by showing us that merely satisfying desires does not lead to happiness, much less enlightenment. Sometimes it is easiest to understand emptiness by experiencing super saturation.
So, just for today take a little taste of excess. (How's that for an oxymoron!). Don't OD on excess, but be, do, or have more than you normally would. Eat three deserts, or have sex three times today (with or without a partner), or give the wino on the corner enough money for a good bottle of cabernet, or exercise at the gym for two hours, or work for 18 hours straight, or write non-stop in your journal for half a day, or.... You decide which excess is calling you. Follow it and see to what wisdom it leads.
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