Tolerance

If you have to learn to be tolerant, you reveal your understanding is limited. There is nothing intolerable in this world. All things are tolerable.

The whole of nature (birds, bees, animals, fish and every truly free human being) accepts all with great pleasure: bad weather like good, death like life, difficulty like joyfulness. There is neither protest, objection nor complaint for everything is in equilibrium.

If you find the most insignificant thing to be intolerable, you yourself are intolerable and exclusive. Since it is impossible for you to destroy or expel all the things in this world to which you might object, your existence is of necessity a frustrated one, a living hell.

If tolerance is your slogan, you are an intolerant person since all such slogans are an involuntary confession of your true nature. Medicine, for example, does not actually cure disease; it merely wages war on symptoms while completely ignoring first causes. As a consequence, patients and doctors both die of one disease or another, despite endless campaigns to eradicate germs, microbes and viruses. This is a striking case of intolerance, intolerance of the existence of God’s creatures.

Absolute justice is another name for the irrevocable order in the universe. It includes good and bad, right and wrong. These opportunities are antagonistic in that they are opposite, yet they are complementary because they do and must exist side by side in our world; they are the front and back of the same coin. To exterminate one for the sake of the other is impossible; even to attempt this extermination is the height of ignorance — intolerance. The judge with no understanding of absolute justice, therefore, cannot possibly hand down a valid decision.

Further, law enforcement by the police, as we well know, can never cure society of the disease of crime; it only battles symptoms unsuccessfully through the apprehension and punishment of the criminal. It substitutes intolerance of the symptom (in this case the criminal) for the deep study of the primary cause of the disease (crime) and its complete cure.

He who accepts everything with great pleasure has no need to know the meaning of tolerance.

~ Excerpt from Zen Macrobiotics by Master George Ohsawa