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Since
taking the SATs, most of us unfortunate slobs who sadly believed that our
futures would be determined by how close we could get to a perfect joint
English/Math score of 1600, probably haven’t spent much time learning
new words or questioning the meaning of words we already know.
After pushing our brains to the limit, we found ourselves severely
unfulfilled by the single-minded pursuit of intellectual knowledge as the
means to some undefined but glorious academic end (or perhaps we just
didn’t get into the college of our choice) and happily traded in our
textbooks to remote view alternative realities, pray to the Goddess at the
right time of the month, and follow the latest guru’s advice on how to
achieve cosmic consciousness. Surely
after putting so much distance between our dubious scholarly pasts and our
glorious spiritual presents we don’t have time for wordplay!
Well, think again! Grab
a dictionary, friends and fellow seekers, because the time has come to
reclaim our brains!
Words,
just like everything else, are subject to interpretation.
They are symbols and how we define them affects how we view the
world and ourselves. For
example, a common synonym for the word compassion, the hallmark of
the spiritual life, is pity, a pathetic little word that brings up
horrible mages of human suffering like famines in Africa or earthquakes in
India to which we respond with vast sums of obligatory American dollars.
Pity just feels negative and implies separation.
"I pity those poor children starving in..." really means,
"I’m so damn glad it’s not happening to me.
Let’s send them some money so we can forget about the whole
thing." But, when you
break the word compassion apart, it means with passion.
And one synonym for passion is feeling and another is
love. When we define compassion
as with loving feeling, we see life in a whole new way and can
choose to truly experience another’s reality without judgment or guilt.
Pity might lead to sending money, but loving feeling leads to
merging with the One Life and gaining access to a higher level of
understanding as a result. Now
that’s the kind of compassion the Buddha (and many other spiritual
leaders for that matter) was
talking about. Hey, maybe
that’s why we spiritually-reformed eggheads abandoned the intellectual
path in the first place. There
just wasn’t any loving feeling coming through those textbooks, was
there?
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