Live, Love, Learn

So you’ve recognized the importance of love. Maybe you’ve had a few memorable moments at which time an overpowering experience compelled you to forever forego your own typically pervasive, inescapable fear of discomfort so that you can experience a universal empathy. But so what? How can you use the knowledge that love (empathy) is important in order to improve the way you live?

This is the important question. Perhaps you understand on scientific and intuitive levels that the distinction between the internal and external worlds is imaginary. Obviously the outside world affects you, but then you realize that you affect the outside world just as palpably. So then the important question becomes one of personal responsibility. The influential writer and speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti noticed this as well.

"First to realize not verbally but in your heart, in your blood, in your whole thinking, that human beings right through the world go through the same agonies that one goes through: the loneliness, the despair, the depressions, the extraordinary uncertainty, insecurity, whether they live ten thousand miles away or two thousand miles or here, they are all psychologically bound together. If one realizes that profoundly in your guts, in your blood, in your heart, in your mind, then you are responsible."
J. Krishnamurti (1979)

Sometimes we do act altruistically and go out of our way to help others. But let’s be realistic. There are bills to pay, wages to earn, and pleasure to enjoy. What, then, is our personal responsibility to others while we are busy assuaging our own fears? It involves a shift in consciousness: a willingness to perform a method within our own minds that enables us to simultaneously serve ourselves and serve others. What is this method? How can we enable ourselves to improve the world during our everyday lives?

We must abandon all discomfort with learning. We must become so willing to constantly learn that it becomes a force of habit. Each of us has a personal responsibility to do so. Stop giving and seeking answers. Instead, challenge your mind by ceaselessly identifying important questions and picking up answers along the way. If you get far enough, you may ultimately arrive at a unifying answer such as love, and you will remember that your goal in the first place was to improve the world beyond yourself. It is at this point that you will again see the value of altruism. You will continue to learn, and you will accept more personal responsibility for your actions and the actions of your government.

How do we apply the learning process to improve government? In most cases, by the time we get to the voting booth, we only have two choices that are given to us. All we can do at that point is to compare the two candidates to each other. What we need to do is improve the quality of candidates who become popular. To do this, we must take it upon ourselves to teach our elected officials how we want them to run our country. We cannot do this effectively until we have learned enough to become proficient with the topics we wish to emphasize. If you want to improve the world, then train yourself to learn.

Moments to Remember

There are moments in our lives that we cherish, and the memories of those moments tend to illuminate our willingness to show compassion. In order to use this selfless motivation as often as possible, we don’t need to remember the exact details of our bestest mostest goodest moments, and we don’t even need to remember images, names, sounds, or any other symbols of those occasions. These symbols are not useless, but they aren’t necessary either. The simple acknowledgement that these moments are still with us is enough of a memory to influence our present experience. All of our memories together define reality, and the memories of our bestest mostest goodest moments miraculously motivate us to conquer the fluctuating shortages of dopamine that we experience as suffering and tolerate within thresholds. Because these memories do not depend on the cycle of discomfort and relaxation, they enable us to replace our restless irks--our universally typical, trivial impulses--with an incomparable selfless joy that is love.

For the purpose of remembering your willingness to love, this insight is a profoundly useful learning experience. The feeling behind it is one of liberation from assumptions. In this state, new assumptions like those of love, fearlessness, and natural beauty replace the past assumptions, so they form the basis of far more sensible contemplation. This is the process of learning. New patterns (assumptions in this case) usually take about 3 months to become habitual, but the initial problem is in identifying and choosing these new patterns. This identification is the process of insight, and along with analysis, it enables and reinforces the process of learning. This reinforcement follows a rhythm between insight and analysis much like the scientific process.

Identify your insightful moments--the ones that inspire and are enabled by love--as your bestest mostest goodest moments. The key to maintaining your compassion revolves around consciously remembering these moments habitually.