# It's all you (take 2)

> *Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.* --- Author unknown

On a long meditation retreat many years ago, I came face-to-face with something that forever changed my understanding of kindness. I'll lay it out as directly as I can, though I don't know how to do so without resorting to mystical-sounding language.

The fundamental nature of my mind is *intrinsic goodness; pure unconditional love*. Yours' is, too --- in fact, it *must* be, because I *am* you. I know that sounds strange, but I swear it's really true.

Let me start by sharing Thích Nhất Hạnh's poem "[Please Call Me By My True Names](https://plumvillage.org/articles/please-call-me-by-my-true-names-song-poem/)." I suggest you read it in its entirety, but here's a poignant section:

> I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.
>
> I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
>
> I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

Doesn't that give you chills? You may feel something similar from reading sci-fi author Andy Weir's incredible short story [The Egg](http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html) (or [watching it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI)). Lest you write this off as "just poetry," let me next share some words from Zen monk (and punk rock bass guitarist) Brad Warner:

> It's all me. Even if I want to put this realization down I can’t. Sometimes it’s excruciating. You know those morons that rammed those planes into the World Trade Center? That was me. The people that died in the collapse. Me again. Every single person who ever paid money for a Pet Rock? Me. **I don’t mean I identify with them or sympathize with them. I mean I *am* them. It’s impossible to explain any more clearly than that, but this isn’t a figure of speech or bad poetry. I mean it absolutely literally.**
>
> But the universe is sooooo much bigger than any of that. The sky is me, and the stars too, and the chirping crickets and the songs they make; sparkling rivers, snow and rain, distant solar systems and whatever beings may live there: it’s all me. And it’s you, too.

"Absolutely literally," he says! And it's not just a nice idea; it's something that can be known directly and concretely. Seeing it clearly reveals an astonishing and heartbreaking game we've been playing with ourselves.

What we perceive as *evil* in a person is actually a measure of their alienation from their true nature. Depending on the nature and degree of that evil, we are sometimes able to recognize it as such and respond compassionately. But beyond a certain point, we perceive the evil as *intrinsic*. As this happens, we begin to wish *harm* on them. We tell ourselves that such malice is *virtuous*, and calculate how it will be a net good for the world. We then pretend that it is this "net good" that we are after, when in truth, it is the *harm* that is motivating us.

What you are experiencing in that moment is alienation from your own light --- the very thing that others perceive as evil. Of course, your allies will choose not to see it that way, because they have a vested interest not to. But they, too, can sense it. This is how the darkness gets in.

It is as though the darkness in the other person has reached out and *allied* itself with the darkness in us (and everyone who witnesses our transformation), thereby entrenching its shadowy tentacles more deeply in the world. It is like a mind-virus that transmits itself beneath the threshold of our awareness, so that we have no idea we're being manipulated. Once embedded in our subconscious, it produces utterly compelling stories of how it is doing *good* --- after all, how could fighting evil ever be *bad*? --- thus sealing itself off from our detection. It protects itself via our defense mechanisms; anyone who questions our motives in this state becomes an enemy.

It is impossible to overstate how insidious and all-pervasive this ruse is. We are *protecting* our true nemesis --- which is not actually our political opponents, nor even "the elites" who are pitting us against one another, but the *very principle of evil itself*. The "conspiracy" goes deeper than you can believe, and I mean that literally: you will never believe that *your own subconscious* is in on it, until you see it clearly for yourself. It is just too painful to admit.

Some part of you knows that this is true --- which means that some part of you knows it is (sometimes) being malicious while pretending to be good. This is precisely the kind of hypocrisy we skewer others for, which means we are even *more* motivated to overlook it in ourselves --- though our enemies can see it plain as day. The only way to continue to hide it from ourselves is to push our enemies *further in*, so that our behavior is justified, and so that we look good by comparison. This sets up a vicious feedback loop that inevitably produces almost *caricaturish* evil.

Here is another way to look at it. Humans have a primal need to know our own goodness. When we lose touch with our *absolute* goodness, we are forced to seek it *relatively*. We then feel compelled to see ourselves as *better* than others, and to keep the world mired in a state where such people continue to exist. This is the fiendishly clever mechanism by which things get progressively worse despite each person being flawlessly convinced they are making things better. Our desire to know our own goodness is being turned against us, and the results are horrifying.

Luckily, there is a way out of this madness: every time you feel the tug toward darkness --- which can easily be recognized in the siren calls of *contempt*, *self-righteousness*, and any other attempt to *elevate* yourself --- you can choose to stop playing its nefarious game. The trick is to recall your profound equality with all other sentient beings, in which case something very different can unfold. In this mode of perception, it is as though the *light* in your mind is able to connect directly with the light in others, thus jointly driving out the darkness. This is true kindness.

Kindness is not about being *nice* --- though in many circumstances that may indeed be its most natural expression. Other times it might manifest as mocking or perhaps even [shooting someone](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dalai-gun/). It's difficult to define what kindness *looks like*, because it can take on almost any shape depending on the situation. This being so, how can we tell whether a given act is *kind* or not? And does the motivation even matter?

Amazingly, it does matter. I cannot prove this to you --- just like I cannot prove that we are all one --- but the primary determining factor for the effects of your behavior is whether or not it is rooted in *your true nature as unconditional love*. The world is infinitely complex and chaotic, making it impossible to even approximately compute the eventual effect of any single action. Just think of the *butterfly effect*. This is what permits philosophers to endlessly debate theories of morality. But the truth has been under our noses all along, even if it cannot be proven by standard techniques. The world is, in some bizarre and impossible-to-convey sense, a reflection of your mind. Darken it at your own peril.

I don't mean to trivialize the problem, either. It is not as though you can simply wake up one day and choose to love someone who's particularly evil and expect anything positive to come of it. In fact, without considerable skill, such attempts can even backfire spectacularly. So we're right to be wary. Distinguishing "kind" from "nice" is a skill, and like any skill, it takes considerable time to build. Luckily, reality is surprisingly good at providing daily examples that are *just* at the edge of our ability to handle. And it is at this edge that the real work happens.

> *If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them.* --- Luke 6:32

Despite being unable to prove any of this, a small voice inside you probably recognizes at least a whiff of truth. Whether or not you can *know* the long-term results of your actions, something feels ineffably *right* about following your conscience --- that aspect of your conscious mind most closely connected to your true nature. The longer we ignore it, the less we can hear its voice, and the more we confuse it for that voice in our head producing compelling narratives about our *good intentions* --- those paving stones on the "road to hell."

I won't pretend that I'm a bastion of alignment, or anywhere near it. Not because of any modesty, but because I've been repeatedly made painfully aware of my own capacity for hypocrisy. I can't say exactly why I'm writing this piece, other than the deep feeling that it's worth sharing right now.

> *My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was [tied to a tree and burned alive](https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8033) in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt / thought more or less okay about what he was doing. And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual / behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity.*
>
> *Reminds me of something (I think) Duncan [Trussell] said on some recent podcast, quoting somebody else: it isn't the victim of violence you have to pray for so much. It's the perpetrator. They are the one who is more trapped in delusion, more estranged from love, etc.*
>
> (From an online forum. Emphasis mine.)

Also see this [page of quotes](https://hackmd.io/@monktastic/radical-kindness-quotes).

###### tags: `kindness`