Humans Are Divine Birds, Born to Soar, Rather Than Mushrooms Meant to Rot in the Mud

Being in a high-energy state really nourishes you. Living well and living happily really matter. Like electrons making a quantum leap, people energized by high energy leap into the next dimension, an entirely new dimension. Their views on the world, life, and values undergo a qualitative transformation. So many heavy burdens from the past are tossed aside with ease. The way of being, thinking, and feeling in a high-energy state is truly free and flowing.

A high-energy state does not just mean peak experiences like becoming a CEO and marrying a beautiful, fair-skinned, wealthy woman. Watching birds, smelling flowers, and watching ants in a park are all high-energy states. Crying your eyes out over stories about ordinary working people, elderly women, and children is also a high-energy state. Feeling safe and comfortable is a high-energy state too. In more advanced forms, Zen Buddhism calls it meditative absorption, or entering deep meditation; Zhuangzi calls it sitting in forgetfulness, or “the empty room gives rise to light.” But whatever you call it, it is the same thing, something everyone possesses, something everyone experiences every year, every month, every day.

So changing your views on the world, life, and values, and your patterns of living, is not a matter of reading texts or debating people. It is a matter of experiencing high-energy states. This is also how humanistic approaches to therapy understand it. Rogers, for example, saw the role of the counselor as helping clients experience healthy, normal, beautiful human relationships, thereby restoring their own humanistic energy.

Looking at it the other way around, why have you still not experienced a high-energy state? It is not because high-energy states lack the power to draw you in or attract you, not because you lack an inner drive toward goodness and growth, and not because the conditions they require are too demanding. It is because the karmic obstructions run too deep, because the mire drags you down. Zeng Qifeng put it wonderfully and clearly: All these years, how have you been keeping fun things from entering your life?

Su Shi said, “The rivers and mountains, the wind and moon, have no fixed owner; whoever has leisure is their master.” The rivers and mountains, the wind and moon, are “the inexhaustible treasury of the Creator.” What keeps people from enjoying the rivers and mountains, the wind and moon?

Human beings are divine birds, born to soar. Our wings keep growing stronger, and the sky keeps beckoning us to fly.

What holds back our divinity, our transcendent spirit? Private ownership, the course of history, karmic obstructions, mud and asphalt scorching our feet and wings.

In the 24th century, after humanity enters a communist society, people will look back in history books at these early human activities and think: What a brutal, miserable way to live.