November 20, 2023
As I finish 80 years of life — a life filled with exciting adventures and unexpected experiences — gratitude and wonder are at the top of the list of feelings. How did I receive the privilege of this life; how did it happen that I awakened one day into the gift of awareness, of having a conscious experience of living this particular life.
What a blessing it now seems, to have found myself on a planet with so many pleasures and delights, and with the gifts of seeing, hearing, and all the other senses available to experience it. As Thomas Traherne put it in his poem “Salutation”:
How could I expect smiles or tears,
Or lips or hands or eyes?
With Traherne, before they were just there, I too:
Did little think such joys as ear or tongue
To celebrate or see:
Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet.
Yet he concludes:
The earth, the light, the day, the skies,
The sun and stars are mine — if these I prize.
I too was given this Earth, and the ability to experience it personally, and even the capacities to learn, remember, and reflect. From those gifts, I have been able to put together my own life story, and even (I hope) gain a certain measure of wisdom.
To Have a Life
Yes, there have been losses, and sorrows, and at times a significant degree of pain. It would be easy enough to complain about my problems. Accumulating this number of years has not been kind to my body, and because I see more clearly than ever the problems of our world, it would require little effort to focus on them. In fact, it seems fashionable today to bemoan the problems of the world.
It is less common to notice what a miracle having an individual life actually is. As wise writers, philosophers, and scientists through the centuries have wondered: Why is there something rather than nothing? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said it well: “Bewilderment about the fact that there is anything at all, and curiosity about meeting that fact as a wonder, is the best part of man.”
The wisest voices that have spoken about why there is anything at all have concluded that the existence of a universe, and their own individual existence in it, is a great mystery — leading to the widespread feeling that gratitude is the most rational and meaningful response. Confucius said it well: “It is better to light one small candle of gratitude than to curse the darkness.” And Plato put it this way: “A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things.” They are joined by the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart: “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”
Think about it for a moment. Before the Earth could exist, the universe had to come into being, yet no one has any idea how that happened. Some people point to the Big Bang, as if that explains anything. But the term “Big Bang” is a metaphor for a mystery.
As with most metaphors, it is useful in some ways, for it makes vivid that the universe we know began a very long time ago, and has been unfolding ever since. Still, do not let the metaphor deceive you, for it does not really explain anything. As Wendell Berry aptly asked:
I. What banged?
II. Before banging
how did it get there?
III. When it got there
where was it?
The simple fact is, no one has any idea how this universe, or this tiny planet with all the marvelous systems we depend on to live these precious lives, came to be. These mysteries have, of course, been investigated for a very long time, but we have only scratched the surface in trying to answer them. As Albert Einstein, one of the smartest scientists who ever lived, put it: “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”
One thing is for sure: My existence in the form I now occupy cannot be cut off from this universe, or this planet. I would not exist — nor would you or anyone else — without the natural world around us. We breathe its air, drink its water, and survive only because of the abundant food it provides. We use its resources to build our homes, toys, and gadgets, and to heal our ailments. We rely on its unique balance of hundreds of individual factors to create the physical environment we depend on for life.
Though we seldom think about it, each day, each moment, we are exchanging atoms, molecules, and energies (as well as feelings and ideas) with everything and everyone surrounding us. It has been estimated that each one of us has hundreds of billions of atoms that were once in someone else’s body, and that we each have some atoms in us that were once in everyone who lived in the past. It is even estimated that we each have at least one atom in our bodies from the breath of every other human who lived a few years before us. We are incredibly interconnected.
These are a few of the elements, when contemplating my existence on this incredible living Earth, that give rise to the feeling that it is a great blessing to be here. Even with all the struggles I personally have faced, and those of the world around me — which will likely go on for a very long time — the privilege of living a human life has been an incredible gift.
I have worked hard to resolve my own problems and issues, and to keep from being overly focused on those I could do little about. For the most part, I have been able to leave my failures and losses and struggles behind — their remnants forming only a small portion of the story of my life (while making a significant contribution to what I have learned).
Now, finally, I have reached the place in which I can join with the novelist and poet Herman Hesse (when in his own late years) saying: “In spite of all the pain and sorrow, I’m still in love with this mad, mad world.”
The Gift of Consciousness
The most precious gift of all, the one that makes having the experience of a life possible, is consciousness. Most everyone agrees that rocks and dirt do not have consciousness, and therefore it is likely they do not have any awareness of what is going on around them. There is much discussion, however, about other living things, about whether they have consciousness. Well, it depends entirely on what definition you wish to use.
Because of its central role in almost everything we humans do, philosophers have been proposing definitions and trying to understand consciousness for thousands of years. How did we come to be conscious, aware of our existence? Plato insisted there is a realm of Pure Ideas that gives rise to, and stands behind, everything in the physical world. The Hindus say that consciousness existed before the physical world could exist.
One thing is clear — brain research has not been able to explain consciousness. For instance, Alva Noë, one of today’s leading thinkers in the field of consciousness studies (a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences), says:
“After decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, the only agreement about how the brain can make us conscious, how it can give rise to ‘sensation, feeling, and subjectivity’ is: We don’t have a clue.”
And Jerry Fodor, a cognitive scientist and leading philosopher of mind, says:
“Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.”
Although we don’t know what it is, we know that, without consciousness, there would be no science, no art, no religion, no friendship, no true romance, no questions to answer, no memory, no self-awareness, and no modern technology.
The Most Unique Gift
However it happened, some forms of life have consciousness. But is human consciousness unique? It is clear that every species has its own marvelous gifts, and complex animals have abilities much closer to our own than many people realize. But are they conscious? Descartes asserted (without any evidence) that only humans are conscious — that all other living things function like automatons, like programmed machines. Numerous philosophers and scientists have followed his assertions (again, without evidence).
But they are mistaken, for there is now much evidence in the opposite direction demonstrating that various complex living things have some degree of conscious awareness. Plants can recognize patterns in what is going on around them and respond in practical and useful ways. It seems that trees can communicate with each other, sharing information that is helpful for their individual as well as collective survival. Fish can adapt to changing situations, and flocks of birds can communicate almost instantaneously in ways we have not been able to understand. All these activities fit one or another definition of consciousness.
Very complex animals (including dogs, cats, and horses) have substantial emotional consciousness — are able to form strong communal bonds within a pack or herd. They can also form strong connections with other individuals within their group, and some form strong connections to individual beings from other species (including humans). A few species — including elephants, whales, octopi, and orangutangs — exhibit sophisticated forms of communication that require a significant degree of intelligence.
All these capacities, from plants to orangutangs, reflect some level of consciousness — depending on your definition. As I was thinking about all this, I began to wonder how many individual living things are there right now on Earth? (Asking about the Earth only makes it easier, for inquiring about how many living things there might be out there in space somewhere seems a bit much.)
Anyway, I googled the question about Earth, and one estimate is that there are around 28 decillion individual living animals and plants on our planet right now, give or take a few septillions. (What is one decillion? A number starting with 1 and followed by 33 zeros. I can’t begin to imagine that many living things, but can and do feel awe at what it conveys about the majesty of this living Earth, this small blue orb floating in the vastness of space.)
Few of those 28 decillion living things, however, have an individual life story — of which they are aware. Do trees experience having a personal life story? Do rabbits or raccoons have an individual story on which they look back and reflect with guilt and shame — or gratitude and wonder? I would guess not, although I do not know for sure. Perhaps whales and elephants do, but it is hard for me to know.
Whatever you believe about the consciousness of various animals, though, there is something unique about being human. Other living things do not write books, study history, build great cities, create computers, design rockets that fly into space and land with precision on the moon, or perform complicated brain and heart surgery. No other species has art museums, ornate concert halls in which music from past centuries is performed, stadium-filled rock concerts, or YouTube. As far as we can tell, no other creatures consciously reflect on the past in order to learn from it, or make complicated plans for the future that are carried out over many years, perhaps even centuries.
All these capabilities only humans have require one unique capacity: “self” consciousness, being conscious of having a separate individual self. This is the one necessary ingredient for most of the activities we humans can do that other species cannot.
Experiencing ourselves as separate from others and from the world around us, we can stop and reflect before taking an action, and consider how our decisions and the actions we take fit in with this unique self — with who we are now and who we wish to be. In this way, we can (when we choose) consciously participate in the creation of our life stories, play a conscious part in determining how our lives will unfold.
Because it is so rare, the gift of a highly developed “self” consciousness has often been associated with the gods. There is something otherworldly about being conscious in this way, something totally unnecessary for surviving and procreating. When we make conscious choices, we have loosed the bonds that bind us to a strictly material existence and soared high above determinism.
In contrast, rocks act totally within the laws of deterministic behavior, and some lower forms of life can be explained in the same way. Without engaging in where the line should be drawn, let me skip to the level about which there can be little argument: When a human being decides to be kind even when someone has been hurtful; when a person chooses to be compassionate rather than serving personal interests; when someone chooses love over anger — determinism fell by the wayside a long way back.
Crucially, much of human culture is dependent on this unique gift. Besides art, science, literature, philosophy, architecture, and the spiritual traditions, the belief that we, as well as other people, have separate, individual selves who can make conscious choices is the ground upon which commitments rest, thus creating the expectation that we will honor our commitments.
If there were no individuals with free will to consciously make and keep promises and commitments, the human world as we know it could not exist. It is the belief that we each have the capacity to promise and commit on which rests much of human life and culture. For instance, it gives rise to the feeling we should take responsibility for our actions and expect others to do the same, and to feel the need to explain our actions and choices to those we care about (at least some of us, some of the time). If neither we, nor others, believed this capacity existed, most important relationships as we know them would disappear.
Further, our whole system of justice, laws, courts, and contracts would be destroyed in an instant, for all are based on the belief that each individual has a unique “self” that is personally responsible for actions chosen. In contrast (to put it humorously), I can’t take a rabbit to court for eating my vegetables.
In the spiritual realm, our capacity to make individual choices is the reason a human life is so precious. To many Buddhists, only in a human incarnation can a being commit to the one “Great Desire” to fully awaken — and have a chance of achieving that aim. For many Christians, only human beings have the capacity to choose the path to salvation, and attain it.
Of course, the capacity to make commitments, and break them, is one reason a human life can be so difficult. And also explains why some of those who faced the greatest difficulties, and hardest choices, have become great saints, leaders, and inspiring role models. They are the ones who made hard moral choices and stuck by them through difficult challenges and times.
I have not been given the difficulties many of the great exemplars faced (or chose for themselves), but we each have at times felt the heavy weight of our own problems and burdens. Most of us, as W. H. Auden describes in his poem “Precious Five,” can:
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
To be honest, when faced with particularly difficult personal problems or when looking at the many pains and troubles in the world around me, I have done my own version of roaring many times. But with age, Auden’s last lines in the poem have become ever more valuable to me as the most meaningful response to being given the precious gift of a human life:
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?
To Have an Individual Life
One thing I know for sure is that I have a unique life and story — because I can look back and remember experiences and organize them into sequences and patterns and derive meanings from the patterns. My personal meanings might not always be accurate in the view of others, but they are important to me, for they form the center of my life.
To have a sense of meanings, that itself is a miracle, for it requires not only the on-going experience of a separate self, but the ability to put together a complex and intricate pattern of memories cohering into one whole. My individual life includes many different experiences, as well as many different thoughts, feelings, and moods, and yet it seems to form one continuous life. At 80, although so much has changed in me and in the world around me, I feel like the same person I remember at 8, and 18, and 48. I am extremely different in so many ways, yet it still feels like “me.”
Another blessing is the capacity to think complex thoughts (it is, of course, a curse as well) — the ability to store and sort and organize vast amounts of information and put it all together into ideas, theories, patterns of understanding that fit with the world outside. And with the understandings of other people. It is so natural to assume all this as a right, but it is an almost unimaginable achievement, especially the collective development of complex knowledge. Isn’t it extraordinary that we humans can share and exchange intricate ideas and knowledge over centuries, and together with many generations of those who have gone before, develop detailed understandings of thousands of aspects of the world?
We humans have also, by combining our knowledge over thousands of years, been able to develop a certain amount of wisdom — although, of course, we often do not pay attention to the wisdom so painstakingly won. Instead, too often we blithely go about our daily lives focused on narrow self-interest, with little regard for others, or for this fragile Earth, the only home we have. Sadly, most of us pay even less attention to the larger forces and energies within which we exist, and upon which we so desperately depend.
Ultimately, our unique human capacities are at the heart of why we must make choices — moral choices. Making a sincere attempt to live by a set of values and to strive to be as clear as possible about the moral framework within which we are making our choices is essential to a fulfilling life. We have the ability to do this, to consciously choose between right and wrong, to choose compassion over bitterness; justice over anger; love over self-interest. We can make these choices — if we will.
One problem, of course, is that there is much disagreement today about values and morality, partly caused by so many asserting that they have an exclusive understanding of what other people should or should not do. But no one has an exclusive claim to truth, or what is right. Instead, each of us must take on the difficult task of finding our own solid moral ground to stand on.
Each of us is like Adam and Eve in the Biblical story — we have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and are thus conscious that our choices and actions will add to the good in the world, or take from it. We can deny this truth, or run from it through thrill-seeking, overwork, media distractions, shopping, drugs, or drink. But the necessity of choice is always there — no matter how fast we run, it is always in front of us, confronting us with each new decision we encounter.
There is good news here, however. No matter how many wrong turns or wrong choices we have made in the past, at any moment we can bend the trajectory of our lives toward a healthier path. There is no need to be perfect — probably there is no possibility of being perfect in a human life. But each one of us can turn toward the light at any moment, and as Barry Lopez puts it, “make your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
And you do not have to do this alone. There are people around every one of us who also wish to make this effort. Look for them. Equally important, wise men and women for thousands of years have been offering help and guidance — and telling us that each person has a higher part of us that is able to discern when we are on the right track. Quakers call this higher part the “still small voice.” Carl Jung and William James called it the Self. Hindus call it the Atman. The Christian word for the part of us that lies beyond the ego is Soul. Buddhists speak of the Buddha within or the Buddha Nature we all share. Various other designations include Authentic Self, True Self, and Deeper Self.
Whatever words you prefer, I have come to know that there is “something” there, something that is a part of me, the deepest and best of me, although it resists all efforts to be put into words. But I know it is somehow connected to consciousness — not consciousness as a physical process in my individual brain (although that is included), but “something more” that is both in me, and greater than “me.” It connects me to others and to the natural world, as well as to a universal current that I cannot know with my thinking mind and certainly cannot capture with words.
Walt Whitman was desperately trying to convey his own experience of this “something more” when he wrote:
There is that in me — I do not know what it is — but I know it is in me.
I do not know it — it is without name — it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
I plead for my brothers and sisters.
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death — it is form, union, plan — it is eternal
Life — it is Happiness.
Turning My Attention to the Larger Pattern
For me, then, as I celebrate 80 intense years of living, it seems increasingly important to turn my attention to those things that are of ultimate significance. I have had the privilege of listening to and sharing in the life journeys of a number of people, and from them I have learned, beyond a shadow of doubt, that wealth, power, and fame do not bring happiness or fulfillment. The current culture of the middle class and higher in America has more wealth, luxury goods, gadgets, and experiences available than ever before, yet so few are content or satisfied. In fact, it can be argued that we are one of the most dissatisfied cultures that has ever existed.
Because I have always had a stubborn individualism, believing I could create my own fate, the importance of my connectedness to others, and my debt to them, has only gradually revealed itself as my life has gone along. Increasingly, though, I have understood that I am not an isolated monad, independently forging my own unique life. Instead, the older I get the less it feels as if I could have done much of anything alone — or that a fulfilling life can be lived just for myself. All the wisdom I have been able to gain up to this point tells me that we are all intimately connected — not only to a few friends and loved ones, but to the larger world and everything within it.
Far from being cut off from other people, everyone I have ever known is a part of me, and I a part of them. Slowly I have begun to recognize just how incredibly intricate these connections are, for I would not exist in any form remotely resembling who I am except for the web of connections and interactions that have unfolded throughout my life. Stop for a moment and consider: Isn’t it amazing that we can share complicated feelings and thoughts with a few other people, can be affected at a deep level by them, and they by us?
I am also deeply connected to a broad range of other people, some of whom I don’t know by name, but all of whom have affected my life in profound ways — starting with personal ancestors and the leaders of the tribes and communities and nations that formed the framework of the cultures that molded my life and the world within which I live.
Nor does it not stop there. There were also explorers, settlers, inventors, community builders, scientists, storytellers, scholars, economic leaders, and on and on — all of whom helped to create the framework within which I have lived out this life. My individual life cannot be cut off or separated from the vast network of all the people who have gone before. Each of us owes a debt to all those who made positive contributions to creating the world we were given.
Taking our connectedness a step further, most of the spiritual traditions of the world insist that no one can be happy or fulfilled when those around us are suffering. Thus one of the only times Jesus spoke about his mission was to say it was for the sake of the poor, the sick, the brokenhearted, and the oppressed. This message has inspired millions upon millions of Christians for two thousand years to sacrifice their own safety and comfort to help others.
In Buddhism, the Bodhicaryavatara says that reaching the highest state includes fully understanding that we are not separate from others: “The Perfection of Charity is superior to all else. Once enlightened, one must be constantly active for the sake of others.” And many Buddhists take the Bodhisattva Vow, saying they are striving to awaken, not for their own sake, but for the sake of all sentient beings. They are affirming their willingness to give up their own well-being — even their personal entry into Nirvana — for the sake of others.
In the modern era, psychologist Viktor Frankl realized the same thing in the Nazi death camps, first saying that: “Happiness is a process, not a goal,” and that it is essential for a fulfilled life to direct your priorities to “meaning, not happiness.” And for Frankl, meaning always involves something beyond the personal self, so a fulfilling life “always points, and is directed, to something or someone other than oneself.”
Perhaps it is the loss of commitment to this truth — that personal happiness is impossible without concern for the well-being of others — that is the reason so many people in our culture are unhappy. Insofar as this message of interdependence is true, then the more a person pursues their personal fulfillment while ignoring the well-being of others, the further their own fulfillment recedes from their grasp.
As far as I have been able to discover, there are only two paths that lead to fulfillment in life: 1) focusing on helping others, either directly or by committing to a cause that serves the higher good for all, and 2) turning one’s attention and energy toward being in harmony with the larger pattern within which we exist. These two paths are not, of course, mutually exclusive, but can be combined — probably must be combined in various ways and to various degrees.
Living in Harmony with the Larger Field
All the wisdom traditions have insisted that there is a higher dimension to our existence — and that we can learn to identify with that part of ourselves, can come to understand that that is who we really are — as opposed to identifying just with our physical bodies, emotional lives, or thinking mind. As the American teacher, writer, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson put it:
“All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being … an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things.”
According to Emerson, there is so much more to us than the material self.
“A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself.”
Who, then, are we, really? For Emerson, our essence is the soul, and our task is to let it guide our actions. This is the result:
“When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it moves through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.”
Fortunately, the wisdom traditions for thousands of years have been giving us guidelines for how best to let the highest part of ourselves shine through, as well as providing practices for moving from one level to higher ones — through chanting, singing, dancing, prayer, meditation, immersion in nature, reading, study, fasting, celibacy, mind-altering chemicals, physical deprivation, and extreme physical exertion.
Two other practices have been especially valuable for me: 1) intentionally turning my attention to a person or subject I choose to focus on, rather than letting my mind jump from one thought to another, or letting it focus on problems and pains it will do no good to pay attention to; and 2) choosing to focus on being of service to others, and sometimes intentionally sacrificing what I want in order to be of service to them.
I have gradually learned to use these practices to move my identity, my sense of who I think I am, away from thoughts and emotions that are not serving my larger life, and to slowly turn my attention toward a higher level of being. Doing this is not easy for me, but it has become more natural with practice. In recent years I have come to know this higher consciousness as more of who I really am than anything going on in my physical body, my emotions, or in my thinking mind.
With Emerson, I have discovered that: “In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin,” and the highest part of me, as with Emerson’s “is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time … but one with them.”
I have therefore come to know for certain that this higher consciousness I experience more and more often is a part of something much greater than my personal self. This consciousness is in me, is a part of me, but it is more than me. When I can step fully into this larger field of consciousness, I am connected to a much broader existence, as well as to all other living things. This larger field flows out and out until it finally includes all and everything — all the natural world, and beyond it, to finally include a “something more” I cannot name.
This “beyond space” is what humans have been trying forever to capture with words such as God, the Tao, Great Spirit, Buddha-nature, Christ consciousness, YHWH, Brahmin, Allah, the Spirit of Nature, Pure Consciousness, and on and on. I cannot resolve the issue of the appropriate name, but I know that, for me, ever more often this “something more” feels like a real presence, and my consciousness sometimes touches, feels embedded in, sometimes even feels like it is merging with, THAT. Emerson’s words sparkle again:
“We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams.
“The relations of the Soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to interpose helps. Whenever a mind can recover its simplicity and receive divine wisdom, old things pass away, and past and future are absorbed into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it.”
The Most Important Things at 80 – and Beyond
As I now approach a ripe old age I did not expect to reach, I have no desire to cling to this life, nor a desire to end it before its natural course has run. With whatever time is left in this precious human life, though, these are the things that seem most important:
1. Keep Opening to the Highest Reality
Through most of my life I have been actively engaged with the world: creating businesses; making and managing money; forming and trying to honor deep relationships; participating in the political, educational, civic, and non-profit worlds; studying history, philosophy, psychology, science, foreign policy, and more; spiritual seeking; writing; and finally teaching. Looking back, it has been, for the most part, a life immersed in the world.
From that perspective, when I first read the following words by the neo-Platonic spiritual seeker Plotinus, they seemed wise but unworldly, almost surreal. With each passing year, however, they have grown increasingly relevant, and I can feel their truth expanding within me.
“It is now time, leaving every object of sense far behind, to contemplate, by a certain ascent, a beauty of a much higher order; a beauty not visible to the corporeal eye, but alone manifest to the brighter eye of the soul, independent of all corporeal aid.
“Let us, therefore, re-ascend to the good itself, which every soul desires; and in which it can alone find perfect repose.”
In a similar way, Emerson’s heartfelt expression of what it feels like to awaken into the highest reality, to experience it fully, continually inspires:
“Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. … It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity; but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.”
My moments of being in this exalted state have not been as numerous as I would have wished, but there have been enough to know for certain that this reality exists — and that it can be experienced in its fullness. The fact that it is there, available to me (and to you) fills me with awe, gratitude, and wonder. I wish to spend as much of my remaining life in communion and connection to THAT as I possibly can.
2. Be kind
Aldous Huxley was a brilliant writer and philosopher, and one of his life-long projects was to discover the nature of the Mystery within which we exist. At the end of his long life he was asked to put into words the most important lesson he had learned. Listen to his simple reply: “Try to be a little kinder.”
It is not usually difficult to be kind to those we care most about, but my life has gradually taught me the profound truth Albert Einstein captured when he said that the primary task of our lives must be “widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”
What keeps us from doing this? According to Einstein, it is, “The illusion that restricts us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us.” In short, we draw our circle of compassion much too tightly. The way out is to recognize that each human being “is a part of the whole that we call the universe.”
In his later years, the great physicist came to the powerful conclusion that each of us is not “separated from the rest,” but instead that we are entwinned with “all living beings and all of nature.”
Why, then, do we feel separate so much of the time? It is a mistake in perception; as he put it, an “optical illusion of our consciousness.” In psychological terms, it is overly identifying with our ego self. Importantly, Einstein’s prescription for healing is the same as that of all he wisdom traditions. To say it in his words again, we must “widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”
The fact that Einstein wrote this almost 75 years ago and included “nature” in that toward which we must have compassion — long before most anyone was aware of the threat posed to the natural world and this fragile Earth — is another sign of his far-reaching genius.
3. Serve What Is Good
Knowing what is good and right and just is not easy, but keeping that intention at the forefront of your heart and mind, using it as the polestar to guide your decisions and actions, is essential for a truly fulfilling life. This, of course, is the message of the Golden Rule, which is the central teaching in hundreds of the world’s wisdom traditions.
A modern novel makes the point in a practical way. The central character in Roland Merullo’s novel Breakfast with Buddha is a Buddhist monk from Mongolia who is traveling around modern-day America with a skeptical companion, offering pithy words of wisdom. One example that moved me deeply:
“Every day, many times every day, you can go one way or the other way. You can go with anger or not go. Go with greed or not go. Go with hate or not go.
“These feel like small things, small choices, but every day … if you choose the good way, again and again and again, in what you are thinking and what you are doing, if you choose to go away from anger not toward, away from hate, not toward … away from falseness, not toward … then you become … good.”
But why should we choose the good? Plato said that he had directly experienced the highest reality toward which our lives are drawn, and it is “The Good, the True, and the Beautiful.” In a more down-to-earth way in the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit Samwise Gamgee tried to say why he was risking his life against overwhelming odds. It was because, “there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”
4. Love
Could it be that love is the whole reason for existence?
The great philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead thought it might be, saying that the mystery, the sacred dimension, is “an all-embracing chaotic Attractor, acting throughout the world by gentle persuasion toward love.”
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky also thought so, saying: “I have seen the truth. It is not as though I had invented it with my mind. I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul forever … In one day, one hour, everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to Love.”
Another great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, although having a very different life, came to the same conclusion: “Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.”
Love, of course, is the word most often given as the primary teaching of Jesus, and countless Christian saints and mystics have made it the center of their lives, words, and actions. Trying to capture his most profound experience, the poet Dante Alighieri, at the very end of his seminal work the Divine Comedy, fervently wishes to glimpse the pinnacle of Heaven. Although it was beyond human eyes to see, he was granted his request: “As I wished, the truth I wished for came/ Cleaving my mind in a great flash of light.”
What did he see in that vision? Not a figure, but a force, and that force was Love.
My will and my desire were turned by love,
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Love is central in most of the world’s wisdom traditions, of course. Toward the end of his life, one of the most influential Islamic scholars, the Sufi saint Ibn Arabi, said:
I profess the religion of love,
wherever its caravan may turn.
Love is my law and my faith.
And Rumi, one of the most famous poets of all time, spoke continually of love as the center of life and existence. One of hundreds of his quotes that could be used: “Love is the astrolabe that sights into the mysteries of God.”
In India, the 15th century mystic, poet, and saint Kabir (perhaps the most quoted poet in India since he lived) had this to say:
Held by the cords of love,
the swing of the Ocean of Joy sways to and fro;
and a mighty sound breaks forth in song.
And 20th century Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore continues Kabir’s theme.
The flute of the Infinite is played without ceasing,
and its sound is love:
When love renounces all limits, it reaches truth.
What all these poets and writers are trying to convey is not what love means to many in our culture — physical attraction, romance, affection, or familial duty — although these are important, and all meanings of the word are sheltered within the branches of the larger tree of Love. But the greater Love of which poets speak involves intention and choice, so it cannot be separated from consciousness. As the poet Frank O’Hara put it in In Favor of One’s Time, the purpose of life is “love assuming … consciousness of itself.”
The highest branches of the tree of love are held aloft by a conscious choice to love others, the Good, the Divine, the Dharma, and/or Existence itself. This can never be a onetime action, but must become a way of life in which you are committed to living into and becoming a person who can truly love.
Love (and compassion, its close companion) are ultimate ways of being and living that one must consciously choose and commit to becoming through daily practice — for the rest of one’s life.
May you have a wonderful Thanksgiving,
David
For other Essays, go to my web site: (https://ameaningfullife.org/)