LIVING & LEARNIN G


Muscle cars and meditation – your two natures


Understanding our primary nature is important for health and happiness because, despite the availability of vast amounts of advice about never giving up on your dreams, if you’re off your primary nature path, it won’t happen or, if it does, it won’t be paired with health or happiness.


By Jost Sauer


BACK IN THE 90S, when I was lecturing at a college of natural medicine, I drove a hotted-up bright red BMW coupé, lowered so much I couldn’t drive it over speed bumps. It really stood out in the college carpark and I used to get flak for it all the time. Fellow lecturers would make derogatory comments about it, and students would regularly ask me why I drove a car ‘like that’. It seemed you couldn’t be on the spiritual path or into natural health if you were into muscle cars.


But I love cars. I always have. I look at cars all the time.


It’s not because anyone told me to do this – there is something about cars that just resonates with me. I’d love to be a car salesman, for BMW preferably, and


8 APRIL 2015


take people out for test drives all day. But I’m not because in Chinese medicine we have a primary nature and a secondary nature. Our primary nature is the one connected to our destiny and the mission we were born with (which, by the way, we all chose to accept). It is known as the ‘will of heaven’. Our secondary nature is human will. The plan is for us to identify and prioritise our primary nature because life will then unfold in accord with the will of heaven and contribute to the good of fellow humans and the planet. Our secondary nature has a role to play too. It is the ‘earth’ to our primary nature’s ‘heaven’, and we do need both because in TCM it’s not heaven or earth; it’s heaven and earth – yin and yang. A harmonious blend of heaven and earth, or primary and secondary,


creates a rich and diverse experience of life. It allows us to be the extraordinary, eccentric individuals we were meant to be. The Dalai Lama is a great example of this. He is undeniably following his primary nature, the will of heaven, benefiting fellow humans and contributing to global harmony, but he also loves watches. He has a collection of these and often wears a $60,000 gold Rolex (a present from Franklin Roosevelt in the 50s). This might seem inconsistent with ‘spirituality’ to some people, but the blend of heaven and earth has nothing to do with consistency or logic. So many people fall into the thinking that it does though. I reckon my next book will be ‘The Monk Who Bought a Ferrari’. The Hollywood action movie star,


Steven Seagal, is another person I find inspirational. He is a Shinto priest and officially recognised as a Tulku (Tibetan incarnate lama) who also makes martial arts movies in which the characters routinely beat each other to a pulp. These are like morality tales in which the stylised violence allows the viewer to get in touch with their own pain. But when I mention my admiration for Seagal, the standard response is usually “How can he be ‘spiritual’ if he is (a) a celebrity and (b) he makes stupid violent movies?” This kind of dismissal comes from the


mind, AKA the enemy of Dao, which all too easily falls into judgment, dogma and analysis. We often apply this thinking to ourselves as well, and then suppress what doesn’t fit in with a preconceived picture of what we should be. But suppression, whether of our primary or secondary nature, creates disharmony between heaven and earth. It is against the Dao as it also suppresses the expansion of the universe. Understanding our primary and secondary natures allows us to ‘nourish our destiny’ and fulfill our cosmic duty. If the Dalai Lama had decided to pursue only his secondary nature, for example, and become, say, a watchmaker, it is unlikely he would have been able to create such positive change in the world. Understanding our primary nature is important for health and happiness too because, despite the availability of vast amounts of new age


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