Paris and the One Heart

The tragic events in Paris happen as I’m in the process of organizing the next online event on ‘Awakening in the Heart’. My first reaction is shock and dismay in the face of all this violence and the suffering it causes. Then compassion and deep love. As I sit with all of this, I remember that there was a time in my life when I used to hate with a passion: I hated capitalists for exploiting workers, and I hated men for oppressing women. The way this hatred was mostly expressed was intellectual, in terms of philosophical argument, as I was teaching political philosophy at the time. But essentially, it was and is the same as that which leads people into hurting and killing others.

The essence of violence is the distinction between ‘me’ and the other, the one we feel justified to hate. The ones we think we have good reasons to exclude from our heart and from our willingness to be and stay open to. Many years ago, by grace, there came a moment when I was shown that I could open my heart instead of hating. At the time, I was in a conflict with new neighbors whose noise levels were way beyond my ability to cope with. The conflict was going nowhere, and found myself stuck with that old hatred that was now directed against my neighbors. I had been on a healing journey and a spiritual path for almost fifteen years at that point, and much of the habit of hating had dissipated. But it arose in that conflict.

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