Stories of Kindness from Around the World

After a couple of decades on this planet, many years of soul searching, and studying the "self," I feel that I am finally closer to knowing myself which ironically seems to be a journey which tells me that the more I understand myself, the less it is that I know. I now can say I have truly felt the difference between the deepest agony of the human condition and the highest state of joy.

I know from my own experience that the main difference that lies between "you" and "me" is just a feeling, a feeling of being separate, isolated, lonely, lost, versus a feeling of being whole, connected, at home, and loved. I think most people, if not all, live with a kind of homesickness, a sweet nostalgia which they can't quite put their finger on as if they were once in a place that they can't quite remember but desperately, somehow, want to get back to.

The mystics have said for over a millennia that in existence there is a fundamental oneness. There isn't and never has been any division or separation at all. Now science is beginning to agree, as they call this same phenomenon a "Unified Field" or a "Theory of Everything."

I believe that at our deepest level, our core, our being, our essence, our soul, and in our very DNA, we inherently know that we are one with each other and one with all living beings. There are flashes of this humanity that many of us can say we have felt in our lives, whether it was the unity experienced at a community gathering such as a wedding, or the brotherhood felt when a collection of activists mobilized together for the common goal of asserting their rights, or at a musical concert where the vibrations of harmony and melody pervaded all the hearts that fill an auditorium, or when the world comes together to celebrate a groundbreaking moment in presidential history.  

The trouble then brews when we get lost in our minds. We have a stubborn mind that fills our being with the deeply-rooted idea that we are separate, a deeply engrained belief that the 'I' is something real. This belief causes a split between what we think in our mind and what we intuitively feel in our hearts, and a division between our head and our heart is formed and strengthened.

From day to day, we live from our heads, from our thoughts and as the split between mind and heart ensues, our misery continues. It has been said that while in the womb and even as infants, we are in a natural state of one-ness, love, union, innocence, and bliss. Then, after a while, gradually as we grow up in the world, we begin to realize that "I am this and you are that;" that "I am here and you are there," and that "I am me and you are you." We start to feel separate. We become self-conscious. We become afraid.

In some ancient eastern languages, the word for "separation" and the word for "fear" is actually the same. We go on and on accumulating knowledge, identity, conditioning, and this sense of "me" gets re-enforced repeatedly and hence the "ego" is hardened and as adults we carry a certain heaviness about us, a worn look, a pained expression, and an overall sluggishness that haunts us and yet we still don't know why.

Trapped in this prison of a mind-made 'me', we long to expand, to grow, to melt, to merge with someone, something, anything. We ache to be back in that place that we once knew. This has all happened because we have forgotten who we truly are. Our light has been blocked by the cloak of darkness, a fear, a mask, a belief, that we must discover not some day, not one day, but on this day that this cloak was never really there.

"Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them to what is deepest within themselves"
- Teilhard de Chardin