"A man, he'll walk straight into Hell with both eyes open, but even the Devil can't fool a dog."
Earl Hamner, Jr.
(My favourite line from my favourite episode of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. This notion of eternal reward is precisely mine as well, dogs intact. You can see the scene here; colourised, sadly, but the shifting tints do enhance the sense of bardo.
Incidentally, Hamner not only wrote all of Serling's "hillbilly" episodes, he was also the creator and narrator of another well-loved series from my youth, The Waltons. His is that voice that supplies the show's abiding soul.)
(Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com and a generous photographer.)
I've been meaning to post on this found teisho since I launched Rusty Ring, away back in the Kamakura Period. Somehow I always found a reason not to; afraid to cock it up, I imagine. But conditions have conspired to kick me into gear.
It seems we've entered the Age of Vengeance, wherein no limitation on the godlike All-Seeing I will be endured. Both Right and Left are stomping about, meting out "justice" from a position of self-declared moral superiority, yet in style remarkably similar to a pogrom. (And also to each other. Here's a koan: if you must become your enemy to defeat him, can you?)
As for insight; empathy; forgiveness; compassion; the instinctive restraint that governs men and women of good faith…
Get a rope.
In such times, a hermit monk could do worse than invite his brothers and sisters To See the Invisible Man.
Robert Silverberg's seminal contemplation on the nature of true decency first appeared in the inaugural (April 1963) issue of sci-fi pulp Worlds of Tomorrow. I became aware of it in 1985, when it was faithfully adapted for the first revival of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone.
For those 20-odd minutes I was riveted to the television; though still in my early 20s, I'd lived enough to recognise the unflinching truth Silverberg was burning into my screen. It's nothing less than a Jataka Tale on the gulf that separates bourgeois morality from the real thing.
In this case, we have a man sent up the river for the crime of "being an arsehole". (No wonder Silverberg's utopian society has done away with prisons; with laws like that, there'd have to be one on every block.)
Will their ingenious, diabolic alternative sentence turn this egocentric bastard into a productive citizen? You'll have to see it to find out.
At this writing, two uploads of the Twilight Zone segment are available on YouTube:
The entire series is also available on DVD.
With track records like these, and any good luck, you'll be able to find at least one of them. The writing, performances, and direction are all excellent. Allowance allowed the changing norms of television production, it's aged very well.
If on the other hand you prefer to read the original, then by truly miraculous wrinkle of the Enlightenment Super-Path:
For the rest, I'll leave you with my war cry:
"That which does not kill me, makes me kinder."
It's a simple insight that I realised soon after I become a monk.
It also explains why my own society frequently hates me.
(Mad-scientist chortle.)
(Photo from a screen-cap of the Twilight Zone episode.)
