HOW WE CHOOSE TO BE IN THE WORLD
A FEW WEEKS AGO, I was in Boulder, Colorado, at the studios of gaia.com, creating a meditation series tentatively called Care of the Soul. I sat on my knees and gave dharma talks about grief, anxiety, forgiveness, right practice, and compassion. Then I guided the audience through a Vipassana/loving-friendliness meditation. I spent a lot of time sitting that day, and the mind chatter that kept taking me from paying attention to my breath during meditation was about responsibility: specifically, what should I do about the injustice, hate, bigotry, exploitation, and other poisons so prevalent today? It is a good question—perhaps the big question of our time—but Vipassana meditation is about coming back to the soul’s presence and away from the pull of the “monkey mind.” Each time the question came up, I told myself, That’s interesting, and I pulled myself back to my breath.
I teach that we should note the persistent thoughts that come to our minds while sitting in meditation and then return to explore them later. If we pay attention to them, diagnose them, and create to-do lists, then we are not meditating; we are contemplating.
Both practices are beneficial, but they are very different practices. In simple terms, connecting to the soul’s presence in meditation is about cultivating peace and empathy. Contemplation is about weighing choices about how we will express our lives in time. Time is our currency here on earth. How we connect in time is how our world and its reality are tied to our destiny, happiness, karma, and our place in existence. Using both meditation and contemplation, the actions we take in time are rooted in empathy.
Today, a giant rock has been thrown into the world’s pond. Its ripples are affecting everything from food security and housing to migration, travel, healthcare, and global economics. Its energy is affecting everyone and triggering unsettling emotions like anxiety, fear, fight, flight, freeze, and withdrawal responses. It reminds me of the time right after I graduated from high school when Vietnam was raging and I moved to a spiritual education-based community. My job was to set up lectures for the school founder. He would talk at churches, schools, businesses, and community organizations to raise funds, inspire people, and recruit students for the school. One of his lectures was titled Man’s Response to Energy. It was about how we chose to use our time.
His basic premise was that how we respond to the energy of events will decide the outcome for us—and that we control that response. In other words, we control how we think and how we process the energy outside us, which is out of our control. He urged the audience to take responsibility for their actions and avoid making excuses leading to laziness, victimhood, or slothfulness.
He was not an “Oh, woe is me” type of guy. He aimed to inspire positive, responsible behavior. He did not want anyone to waste their time on earth. He taught that labeling energy as good, bad, or neutral was unhelpful: “Why judge the why?” he said. “Move on with your spiritually based thoughtful response.” He also said prayer, hope, and contemplation must lead to action to have any value. At the end of each lecture, he would ask an audience member to read the Great Invocation (a universal prayer published by Alice Bailey) and call on us to be world servers.
So how do we respond to the energy from this big rock thrown in our pond? More specifically, what does our sense of time have to do with our response to this energy? If we expected the world to move ahead differently, we may feel disappointment or anxiety. In Zen speak, we were attached to the world’s future going a certain way—and it is not going that way.
As the ripples of that rock affect our everyday lives, we can allow our soul and our happiness to be swept away by waves of anxiety, fear, anger, and grief. We can drop out, disengage, and make our world very small. If you feel compelled to do this, don’t feel alone. Monks drop out to live in isolated monasteries, and good has come from them. I made my own choice to join what was essentially a monastery, and the lessons were invaluable. But as the Chinese proverb says, “Small sage lives in a cave, big sage lives in a city.” The world now needs big sages. How will you choose to be in our world? I hope you will choose now to be a loud, reckless, outrageous, happy, purpose-driven world server.
“Empathy takes us out of isolation caused by relying on language, religion, race, birthplace, gender, or economic status.”
I speak English, and I can say “thank you,” order pizza, and get help finding a bathroom in a few more languages, but there are about 3,000 other languages in Africa and 7,000 languages in the world that I don’t speak. So I could withdraw, complain about my limited language skills, be mad that we don’t have a common lingo, and feel separated. But I know withdrawal, avoidance, and indifference to the suffering in the world will not move me toward happiness, flourishing, or fulfillment.
So I start not with words or actions but with Vipassana. Empathy is the world’s language, the language we all speak that can connect us. Empathy puts us in a relationship with ourselves and with each other. Empathy takes us out of isolation caused by relying on language, religion, race, birthplace, gender, or economic status. Empathy allows us to best contemplate our choices and connect through our actions. It doesn’t take away the pain. Life is to be lived—in messy relationships, unkept promises, disappointment, sadness, and death. Yet empathy will naturally move us to be where we need to be in the world.
Paul Sutherland tries to meet the energy of each day with empathy and thoughtful, loving kindness. He would love to hear how you meet each day and manage the big rock thrown into the world’s pond at paul@paulhsutherland.com.