Active and Effective Citizens
You might think that if you let go of your ego world, you become passive and defenseless like some kind of crash dummy and people will take advantage of you. Or that you might wander around aimlessly in the street without an agenda. If this were the case, as one contemporary Buddhist master pointed out, it would be necessary to have enlightenment wards in hospitals to take care of bruised or socially inoperative buddhas. But this is not the case. Rather than being inmate types, people who have become enlightened to any degree are builders of hospitals for other people. Their intelligence and compassion are relatively unobstructed, and they tend to become quite active and effective citizens.
~ Samuel Bercholz, in Entering the Stream; from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book.
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