A Modern Tale


There was a guru once, a modern man but one who had studied the Way for many years. He lived in a modern city and felt it was a proving ground for his insights that he could maintain them in the face of hustling and bustling humanity.

He worked himself free of personal constraint, mental frames and spiritual prejudgments and finally believed he could achieve levitation of the body with the correct concentration. He worked at it for many weeks. One day, while walking down a certain avenue past a large office building he suddenly perceived the correct perspective in consciousness from which levitation could be manifested as an act of will.

He felt his body grow lighter as he walked down the street, and lighter still. Suddenly he knew it was above the ground.

As he drifted slowly upwards, rising above the shoulders of the pedestrians on the avenue, he glanced upwards at the windows of the office building. He passed the third floor, then the fifth.

At the same moment another man, one who had spent his years pursuing great profits at the expense of others, was culminating a great unhappiness in his life and avoiding certain arrest and scandal by deciding to jump from the roof of the same office building. He faced his difficulties one last time -- he hoped -- and tasted the bitterness, despair and desperation of all he had done; and with a single determined step he threw himself from the roof. He felt the wind ca sna plummeted, past the twentieth, the fifteenth and the tenth floor.

At that moment, he looked in the window of the office on the tenth floor. At the same instant the guru who was ascending was also passing the same floor in his discovery of levitation as an act of will.

At one moment each of these souls heard the other mutter quietly,
"So far, so good."

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