Thank you for sharing your reflections on our compassionate universe experiments over the last few weeks. It’s been an inspiration to hear from each of you. If you haven’t had a chance to try one of our previous activities, this week is another opportunity!
We encourage you to continue your contemplation in nature by choosing one of the following activities:
Experience the mantram in nature for 15 minutes, again!
Reflect on the passage “Let Me Walk in Beauty” and/or begin memorizing it.
Read and comment on the excerpt from Easwaran’s The Compassionate Universe below.
Also, a reminder that if you already have this passage memorized, have you been using it in your meditation this month? Have you noticed an impact?
This is an excerpt from The Compassionate Universe, by Easwaran.
Many people get depressed by the current state of the world. The sheer vastness of the problems we face is daunting, and it is only natural to feel terrible grief when we read about millions of acres of forests being burned, or several species becoming extinct every day, or the atmosphere being dangerously altered.
Yet few people realize what a valuable resource for change this grief is. Quite often, in fact, when I suggest trusteeship as a remedy for the environmental crises that face us, I am told that this is too small a solution, too tiny a drop in the ocean. “Me? What can a little person like me do?” people ask me again and again. “There’s so little time left, and there are so many people who don’t see the connections. So what if I stop using plastic cups and start planting a few trees? How much can that do?” I always appreciate questions like these – they often come from people who care deeply and whose despair arises from a desire to solve the problem rather than just get by until tomorrow. To be well adjusted in a wrong situation is a very dubious achievement.
I am not a theoretical person, and I never answer such questions theoretically. Instead, I usually narrate an incident from my own experience – an incident in which grief at the suffering of other creatures helped make a lasting, positive impact in several areas, affecting the way more than a million people treat the environment, each other, and other living creatures.
One day, as I was walking near our home on the Blue Mountain, I saw a man leading a little black calf to slaughter. To me, the calf ’s large, dark eyes seemed to be pleading, “Are you going to let this happen to me?” I was deeply upset – not only by my grief for the calf but by the realization that there were countless more like him.
Then and there I decided that at every opportunity I would put in a good word for animals. I did not know then where that would lead me.
My ancestral family has been vegetarian for centuries, so I grew up with a natural appreciation for the beauty of a vegetarian way of life. When I first came to this country in 1959, I was sorry tosee that vegetarian cooking, while not altogether unheard of, was extremely rare. It was almost impossible to find a vegetarian meal in any restaurant; to tell the truth, I remember eating quite a bit of ice cream. Before long, though, my friends and I got together and began experimenting with California’s abundant variety of vegetables, grains, and fruits; a few of us even specialized in researching the nutritional requirements of a healthy vegetarian diet. The eventual result was one of the first complete vegetarian cookbooks in the United States, Laurel’s Kitchen. It presents the beauty and healthy common sense of vegetarian eating, and has sold over a million copies.
What we did not realize when we began, but what has become abundantly clear in recent years, is that Laurel’s Kitchen is also a handbook for the preservation of rain forests and endangered species and for the reduction of the greenhouse effect. Now – in 1989 – there are ten million vegetarians in this country; each one of those ten million, by reducing America’s demand for imported beef, is saving an acre of rain forest each year. Through the power of meditation, the sorrow I felt at seeing that beautiful calf ’s life cut short was transformed into a fortune in active compassion, which enabled my friends and me to play a part in saving more than a million acres of rain forest annually: not because we are great people, but because that is the way the compassionate universe works. You do not have to be rich or famous or powerful to make a difference. When you work in cooperation with others, motivated by compassion and using thrifty, artistic means, your actions send ripples of positive change in every direction.
To be able to transform your anger or grief into a force for positive change is one of life’s most exhilarating challenges. When I hear about young people surfing the twenty-five-foot waves at Waimea Bay, I often wish I could introduce them to this skill. That’s the kind of daring and dedication it takes not to be swept away by anger or fear or greed, but to catch those towering waves that roll across the mind and ride them to a more peaceful, healthier planet.
I am prepared to make a bold claim for the way of life I am presenting here: the person who looks upon his or her entire life as a trust – body, talents, training, compassion, intelligence, and especially the heart’s deepest fears, anger, and sorrows – such a person will never burn out, feel defeated, or get depressed or bored.
The Japanese have a little doll called the “daruma doll”. If you push it down, it bounces right up again. That is how you can be: nothing will be able to keep you down, no matter how hard the blow, how fierce the storm. In fact, when you get good at it, you will look forward to storms, as Gandhi did, because every crisis will be an opportunity to reach deeper into the bottomless well of compassion and creativity within. You will actually be able to thrive on stress.
This is the challenge we face as we embark on the last decade of the twentieth century: to transform ourselves, each in our own small way, as Ashoka and Francis and Gandhi did; to rebel against the conditioning that keeps us bound in a self-destructive way of life; to take all the immense wealth of our hearts and place it in trust for the welfare of the world. There is no greater challenge than this, nor is there greater satisfaction.
George Bernard Shaw put it beautifully: “This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you’re thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
When you jump up every morning eager to contribute to life and drop into bed every night deliciously tired because you have given your best without seeking anything in return, you will see love in the eyes of all around you, acknowledging the nobility of human nature they see in you. And even the most confirmed cynic, when he sees you forgiving and even befriending those who strike at you, will not be able to help saying – if only under his breath – “How I wish I could be like that.”