Esteemed Reader

Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:

When my son was learning to walk we had an infestation of ants in our house. They crawled along the floors and over the counters, up the walls, and somehow found their way into the refrigerator. My son, who was just over a year old, was entranced by them. His speed of travel was about the same as the ants’, and he followed them as they crawled around the room. His first impulse was to step on the ants, or squish them between his little fingers.

I stopped him and said: “The ants are beings, Asher.” He looked at me quizzically. “Beings?” he questioned in his pure, sweet voice. “Yes,” I said. “You are a being also. And so am I, and so is mommy. Everything alive is a being. And we have to take care of all beings—be kind to them, and not hurt them.” He turned to something else, as though my little lecture had been lost on him.

To my surprise he began to observe the ants from a distance, and when he couldn’t resist picking them up he was careful, at least as careful as his new hands could be.

I was startled by his receptivity to what might be considered a moral lesson. Rather, it was as though there was an awakening of an impulse that was larger than an ordinary ethical question. It appeared to me that he had gained a sense of compassion that can only come from recognizing that oneself and another share the same existence.

I think we all have within us an original cognition that all life is one. But something impedes that knowledge and we must re-cognize that unity. It is knowledge that is intrinsic, but covered over by accretions of conditioning that make us forget what we know. Observing myself I see a multitude of obstacles to feeling compassion. Primarily I see fear—fear for my safety, fear that if I don’t take care of “number one” I will be abused or defeated.

But there are certain ideas that ring true, and can help to reconnect with something innate. I find it helpful to consider the body as a model, which I first discovered in a book by Rodney Collin (a great but little-known book called The Theory of Celestial Influence). The body is made up of a “beings” that live in various dimensions and scales of time. A red blood cell, for instance, has an independent existence within the “world” of the body. It is part of a population of billions of other red blood cells that live within the body at any given time. But each red blood cell lives for only about 3 months. In fact every cell in the body is replaced with a new one every seven years. So the body is really comprised of multitudes of “beings” that are born, live, and die continuously throughout the its life.