It’s often easier to write in a small room. Your mind will find it easier to engage with itself in mappable surroundings; you can take it in, conceive of it, in a glance. Yet a big empty space filled with stuff, a library let’s say, can give a feeling of intimate space. And a smallish, empty room might give off echoey empty vibes that could distract. Any mental activity requires a conceptual space and an actual, physical space. They interact. Six hundred years ago Meister Eckart wrote, “compassion means justice.” 20c poet, potter, and teacher M.C. Richards, noted: ”Acceptance is part of love. It is devotion to the whole.” By freeing ourselves from evaluation we can attend to and nurture perception. We can then participate in the centering activity that is the cosmos. We immerse ourselves in the spaciousness of creation. Roominess is a centering space filled with love and compassion.
Pain. Isn't pain the biggest fear of all.? The avoidance of pain and searching for pleasure. In Buddhism these two things are at the root of all suffering because they are both forms of attachment. But today, I'm seeing people all over social media feeling sad and complaining about having to shift their lives and I feel no pity. Rather, I feel mainly total impatience and irritation. There is a way in which political concerns dry up compassion at the individual level. Who can feel sorry for the privileged middle class person in the face of all the unaddressed suffering in the world. And the thing about the buddhist attachment hypothesis, if you will, is that it seems predicated on ignoring how certain people suffer because they have an "attachment" to, like, basic life. Bare life, as the philosophers say. But the sun is coming in and I can get just about any music I want to listen to pumped into my house at the mere statement: "Alexa play..." I am the queen ...
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