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This week, Easwaran describes to us the benefits of being able to develop a passion for kindness, a reflex for generosity.
Easwaran describes this passion or reflex as a “disposition for benevolence”. Which aspect of his description below is most intriguing to you? Why?
Have you tasted the satisfaction in letting go of your own way? What was the effect on you and others when you were able to try this?
The excerpt below is from the Spring/Summer 2017 Blue Mountain Journal, by Eknath Easwaran.
Peace as a skill
This “disposition for benevolence, trust, and justice” which Spinoza defines as peacemaking flows from that very aspect of our nature which is not part of an animal heritage, but distinctly human. It is a skill, a skill in thinking, and like any physical skill – swimming, skiing, gymnastics, tennis – it can be learned by anyone who is willing to practice.
This approach should have immense appeal today. We know how to teach computer programming and coronary care nursing. The mystics tell us simply to do the same with peace: to approach it as a skill which can be systematically learned if we apply ourselves to the task.
When we first set out to learn this “disposition for benevolence,” of course, the going will be rough. The conditioning of stimulus and response, “an eye for an eye,” is strong. But as meditation deepens, you find there is a fierce satisfaction in letting go of your own way so that things can go someone else’s way instead. Gradually you develop a habit of goodness, a hang-up for kindness, a positive passion for the welfare of others. In terms of emotional engineering, you are using the mind’s enormous capacity for passion to develop the power to put other people first: and not just verbally, but in your thoughts and actions as well. Eventually kindness becomes spontaneous, second nature; it no longer requires effort. There is nothing sentimental about this quality, either; kindness can be as tough as nails.
We can see in the life of Gandhi how he developed this disposition for kindness. Even as a young man in South Africa, he wrote that he was unable to understand howa person could get satisfaction out of treating otherswith cruelty. Yet this attitude was not enough in itself to prevent him from reacting with anger when provoked. It took years of practice to drive this conviction so deep that it became an integral part of his character, consciousness, and conduct.
Uneducated minds
Why do we feel we have to lash out against others? The mystics give a very compassionate explanation: because we have uneducated minds. If the mind acts unruly, that is simply because we have not put it through school.
This kind of education is scarcely available any where in the world today. I have had the privilege of being associated with great universities both in this country and in India, and I deeply wish that in addition to educating the heads of their students, they could teach the skills that enable us to educate our minds and hearts. It is what we know in the heart, not in the head, that matters most; for what we believe, we become. “As a man thinketh in his heart,” the Bible says, “so is he.”