Driving
I have been meaning to write this post for long time already because what is about to come in the rest of this post, has some amazing feels to it.
With both hands gripped firmly on the top of the steering wheel, I stared out the window. I often have these moments in life where I drift away in my mind while I let the car sail me home. Today was one of those days. However, the things I am about to explore today was something that was going to change the way I speak to and relate to people completely. After I have felt this, I kept revisiting that circle of feeling because it was so glorifying. I can say that it was an enlightening experience indeed. What was in that circle though?
Before you continue, if you haven’t yet read "Chloe, the fish", please do so. This concept builds onto that.
Our actions
Sometimes, it is seriously difficult to differentiate the differences between right and wrong, good and bad. When I was still in grade 4, my friend asked me "if someone killed your parents, would you take revenge? Would you sue them? Would you get them into jail? Would you kill them if you had the chance?" My immediate response was "No". I knew very clearly from my perspective of judgement, but I was not able to verbalise my thoughts and feeling to someone else to let them know why I would not do that. At that point in time, it was very correct for my friend to take revenge for his parents. Which, in my perspective, it isn’t wrong to take revenge, but … If we follow the footsteps of someone that we know is well known for performing a great act of kindness, Mandela, then we can see that even though there was a racial battle, but he did not take revenge when he was in power. Instead, he turned the tables around and encouraged the growth of the opposite race to maintain the reputation and recognition for the purpose of harmony.
If we take another person that is also globally known for being righteous, Jesus. When he was crucified on the cross, he didn’t bare the heart of revenge. Alternatively, he bared the heart of benevolence and asked God to forgive those that he would have taken revenge on.
Somehow, it feels slightly ironic to be treated like a prisoner (literally, sometimes) and when you have the power to revenge them, you actually give them even more love than normal people. Whenever I see that, I know I seen a person enlightened by something out there that is greater than our own capacity. That something that can fill the night with sparking stars and burn the sun for our warmth.
But now, let me pull it back to this friend of mine. How is it that my friend wasn’t able to see this? So if I was ever able to speak to this friend again, this is what I would have said to him…
Let us take an action that we know is righteous. Since we already know that one is all and all is one, I am sure this would express myself well. Let us take the act of caring for example. When we see a toddler baby learning to walk next to the road and he trips and falls, what is our immediate reaction to that? What would we do? Would we naturally want to give this baby a hand? Or would we want to kick this baby once more so that we feel more powerful? Obviously, if we're a person with some form of dignity, we would rush to help the baby up. What causes us to want to do that? Why would we want to pick the baby up? What makes us naturally want to rush over without a second of thought to give the baby a helping hand?
Heart Thoughts
I would say, it is because we have a caring heart. You probably already had this in mind the moment I ask the first time. Here is where it starts to become a little bit more mysterious. We know that caring is displaying kindness and concern for others. I think Google also defines it like this. So now we know that that is caring, what stimulates that caring heart within us though? Why did it not trigger the hatred heart instead? Why did it not trigger the happy heart? Why did it specifically trigger the caring heart? Well, let us look at what stimulates our thoughts. I personally believe that it is stimulated by our intentions.
Intentions
For us to have a caring heart for this baby, we need to have a good intention. What causes our intentions to be different though? When an adult falls, there is a chance that we wouldn’t go pick him up because our intentions that we will create will differ accordingly. Can we say that our intentions are created by our surrounding environment?
So when I get bullied when I was young, I tend to not care about what the bully did to me. I would stare back at them with a serious face and they would stop bullying me. There is a lot of stories that I hear that differs completely to what happens to victims. Some people bully the bully back. Some people get into a serious depression. Sometimes, we can debate that the environment is different, but then we can use another scenario to explain it. There is a boy that lives in a mansion. He gets all the tools, love and stationary he needs to complete school. He ends up taking drugs and gets stabbed to death while trying to smuggle. There are obviously ones that can still finish school in the same supportive environment without taking drugs. The other scenario is in the rural areas. There is a boy that walks 2 hours to school and back. After school, he needs to work part time to feed his younger brother and sister. He then needs to teach them how to complete their homework. He manages to take on extra sports to keep healthy. Finally, he squeezes homework in at night. He becomes successful without taking drugs. There is still something inside of us that decides the different intentions that we end up creating. We still have the choice to take drugs whenever we want to. We still have the choice to be as hard working as this boy from the rural areas. We still have the choice to walk away from a baby that fell on the floor. What is that? What causes us to have those choices? What is that intention that causes us to make those choices?
This intention can either be a good one or a bad one. Whenever we are given a situation, we can either interpret it as good or bad. A lot of the time, it stems from our knowledge and understanding. A lot of the time, people don’t even know why we had such intentions. So how do we maintain having good intentions then? How can I control what kind of intentions I have? How can I change my bad intentions into good ones?
Past experience
Well, let us see what causes our intentions to exist. The common answer for this is our pass experience. These can either be good or bad. I do believe, however, that there is another mysterious thing that influences our intentions….
The ocean
We are like a droplet of water. Each and every single one of us is like a droplet of water. When a droplet of water touches another droplet of water, it bonds into a bigger droplet of water. When we were walking down the side of the road and we saw this baby, we connected our droplet with the baby’s droplet. The moment he fell, we could feel his/her pain. The moment we could feel the baby’s pain then we naturally create the intention to stimulate the caring heart which then created our action to pick him/her up.
This little two combined water droplets is very small. Once we get millions and millions of droplets together then we created a sea. What is strange to me is that I always feel like there is an ocean out there that is a lot more massive than just a sea. I feel like this ocean feeds us trickles of water and wisdom to sustain us from becoming insane. This ocean is what I call God. Sometimes, I also call this ocean Dao. Sometimes, I also call this ocean, the ocean of wisdom. Sometimes, I believe there is no name that you can actually give it or its meaning changes. The ocean has the capacity to contain us all. Sometimes, we just don’t connect to it because there is a layer of thick dense dust covering our droplet of water. When this happens, then our intentions is driven by our past experience and not the ocean.
So the root to the branch of choices is at the door between us and the ocean. Once we can swim freely in the ocean without any dust covering us then we will feel how massive this ocean actually is. How much love and compassion it contains. How much forgiveness it provides for the living souls. How beautiful this mysteriousness is. And most importantly, it forgives the people who attacked my parents. It forgives the people who bullied me. It even picks up an adult from falling. Because no matter who you are, it loves us all.
I am sure this ocean will let me know the meaning of life once I am ready for it…