The Voice of the Rising Tide

I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Zen master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness for the past year. I posted a note on that back in January of 2020 called “The Enlightened and the Lonely.” It was weirdly more prescient than I could have ever known.

Turns out we’re all insane and we’re all locked in the same institution together whether we like it or not. I did not see, however, that there would be a certain group of idiots stuck in this place with the rest of us who are dead set on fucking things up and being assholes. They are not funny, but they are hilarious at the same time. The riddle is how we manage to find a way to feel love for them even though they are such screw ups.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and re-reading in Thich Nhat Hanh’s book everyday for the past two weeks:

When your mind is liberated your heart floods with compassion: compassion for yourself, for having undergone countless sufferings because you were not able to relieve yourself of false views, hatred, ignorance, and anger; and compassion for others because they do not yet see and so are still imprisoned by false views, hatred, and ignorance and continue to create suffering for themselves and for others.

The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh, p. 58

He’s leading up to a discussion about what he calls “the meditation on compassion.” That discussion is in a section called The Voice of the Rising Tide.

I am not a religious person. I do, however, understand the importance of truth. These days, I sure don’t see a lot of true compassion in our world (except perhaps frontline staff in ICU wards).

I will probably continue reading the paragraph above for the next few weeks. It’s interesting to me that in the midst of all this crapola, tons of people are supposedly meditating and doing yoga, but there’s so little compassion in the air.

Compassion is the opposite of selfishness and self-preservation. The rising tide is the opposite of trickling down.

You can read my earlier essay on The Miracle of Mindfulness, The Enlightened and the Lonely, published in January of 2020.

Also published on Medium.