Ken Wilber uses a phrase to describe the dual development of wisdom and compassion on the spiritual path, “Hurts More, Bothers you Less”. This is pointing to the relationship to suffering as one’s contemplative understanding deepens. Somehow suffering is more real, and hurts more deeply, but at the same time because one’s identity has expanded to include more it just doesn’t bother “you” as much.
Along those same lines it occurred to me today, as it often does in different ways, that I really don’t know what this life will bring. More then ever I find that my view on life is that things are extraordinarily uncertain. My mother-in-law’s car dropped twenty feet just a few days ago, a fall that could have easily killed her. Fortunately she is alive, but she came out of the accident with a cracked collarbone and a lot of pain. Tomorrow I board a plane to go to a meditation retreat. I may not make it. I lost my wallet a couple of days ago, and then found it while cleaning up the backseat of my partner’s car. Nothing is certain, on either the macro or micro levels. Because of this fact, and because I’ve seen it so clearly on a moment-to-moment level I really don’t get to caught up in how things will or should unfold in this life.
At the same time I feel ever more compelled to live a life based on values and principles of awakening, and I love more then ever what I’m doing in life, the people I’m meeting, and the path that seems to have unfolded before my very eyes. I care tremendously about people, those I know and those I don’t. It’s not always easy to connect in with this caring, but it’s there, and it seems to drive this life.
What I’m trying to get at is that the movement of this life, largely motivated by contemplative discipline and a deepening of realization into the nature of things, has left me caring more while also caring less.
December 22nd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Beautifully put Vince. Right on.
December 22nd, 2007 at 10:03 pm
I agree. Very nicely constructed. I feel like I can relate quite well. The way these words hit me was much like the idea of not focusing on outcomes so much as behavior. (Or, in the case of love and caring, behavior becomes ‘connection’, ‘emanation’, ‘energy’, ‘empathy’, etc.)
I love this idea, or these ideas, and perhaps it unfolds in my own life with ‘right effort’… Yet at times it’s hard not to wonder about outcomes.
What about the big issues, global concerns? How do I fit in? Do I care more about organic farming or feeding starving children in Africa via chemical fertilizers? Do I have to choose? Does someone else get to choose? Is everything happening exactly as it is supposed to happen? And if so, does this imply a sort of transcendent determinism? Should I even worry about it?
Ultimately, there is no past and there is no future. There is evolution. There is change over time. And as consciousness acts on the world, it seems as though it affects its own development. A Kosmic feedback loop. Evolution arising in four quadrants.
What I say and do does matter. There are ‘outcomes’ per se. And so ‘caring’ about ‘what happens’ is valid, worthy, and important. The trick is to not be attached to results, or to a certain state of ‘this’. This is just this. And it matters.
January 8th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Wow, are you for real? Yesterday I was saying to a teacher that every fall I watch a new crop of grad students transvalue their values to the life of the mind. They take to it quickly and the world of consumerism falls straight into shadow. But buying in to the life of the spirit and the values that you live by is not quite so common. Why? Mabye we don’t have as many encompassing institutions for this. Or a sense that it is actually (not to go straight for the ego or anything!) in a way heroic.
Anyway, lovely to trip across this beautiful blog–I’ve been following the Geeks and the Techsattva all along.