Sunday Whatever – Confucius Still Speaks an essay by Dale Williams Barrigar

The legend about him, or I should say one of the many legends about him, is that he was nine feet tall.

No one now believes that the great Chinese teacher Confucius was really nine feet tall.

Nine is a magic number. That number was chosen for a reason.

Saying that Confucius was nine feet tall meant, and means, that his ideas, and his presence, were nine feet tall.

We live in an age when our technological brain has grown out of control like a Frankenstein cancer, while our innate symbolic understanding has shrunk to the size of a pea, a pebble, a grain of sand, a puff of wind, or less.

Such a situation results in two dire consequences.

ONE: fundamentalism. An irrational belief in impossible fantasies.

TWO: secularism. An irrational belief that the only thing there is in this world is materialism (both scientific, and economic).

Neither of those two things are true, and both are EQUALLY dangerous: horrifically so.

It’s said that Moses lived to be 120 years old, and that when he died, his eyesight and his physical strength were undiminished, the same as they had been when he was 40, or younger.

He died on the mountain looking out over the Promised Land.

He never made it to the Promised Land, after forty years of leading his people in that direction through so many tribulations, troubles, and trials it is truly epic and astonishing.

He didn’t reach the Promised Land; but he could see it stretched out there before him from the top of the mountain.

Everything, and that means everything, about Moses’ death, as we know it now, is SYMBOLIC.

It is a historical fact that Confucius worked many small jobs throughout his life, such as being a shepherd, and being a record keeper.

It’s also a historical fact that he died as a “failure.” He only ever had seventy-seven disciples while he lived (and only ten who were truly close to him, but who were, in the end, more than enough), and no one in power, anywhere, was ever willing to implement his policies about how society should be run.

Had we (meaning humans) done so, many centuries of needless bloodshed, horror, oppression, conflict, and toil could’ve been avoided.

Confucius once said that he’d been too busy studying to notice himself growing older.

And he emphasized that the studying was done FOR THE LOVE OF STUDYING, and not for any other reason.

He believed that if you followed your own inner voice (which the Romans called the daemon) and turned yourself into the best possible person you could ever possibly be, no matter what else, and without worrying about the consequences, or lack thereof, that arrived, or did not arrive, from “the world,” then joy would come your way, and a kind of ultimate satisfaction, too.

Chasing down the material pipe dreams of the world is always a lost effort, according to Confucius. Like Jesus, he offered all of his teachings for free.

He also said that if a man (a person) has rough food, enough water, and a bent elbow to lay his head on, this was all one needed to attain happiness and satisfaction, IF these basic material necessities were/are accompanied by the burning spirit to live inside that comes from inside, and that can’t be taken away from the outside – by anyone, or anything, ever (unless you let them). (A Stoic philosopher once said, “Nero can kill me, but he can’t harm me.”)

I recently saw a “homeless” man standing outside his dilapidated and falling-down tent on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, USA, in a green, sunny field, otherwise known as an abandoned lot.

He looked healthy enough in his own way, and he had a bottle in a paper bag in his hand, and HE WAS DANCING in the sun.

Just that, and it was enough.

All by himself, outside his tent, homeless and probably alcoholic, in a ragged field, the black man danced, and sang.

The sun and the bottle and the green grass do not last forever, but they are enough, if you are enough, inside. All three of these things are real.

AND: SYMBOLIC. 

Dale Williams Barrigar