The other night my wife Carolyn and I had just finished re-watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and were sitting on our couch, basking in the afterglow of Joss Whedon’s awesomeness, when I got a few texts from an old buddy of mine. 

The texts were links to YouTube videos of Trumpers who were devastated by Trump’s loss of the presidential election, but some guy had made soundtracks to the videos. As each person described his or her anguish, the guy played a melodramatic, minor-key piano, tailored exactly to their words. It was pretty funny shit. Carolyn and I laughed. 

But at one point this odd thing happened. On the second video, as the guy’s mock-sad piano played, this middle-aged woman was almost weeping about Trump’s loss. And something about the strain in her voice to hold her tears back made a hot ache rise up in my chest. In the next moment I noticed one of her braided pigtails had come a little undone and I thought of her fixing her hair that morning and maybe feeling good or bad about how it looked. I flashed on how I, too, have strained my voice not to cry, and how I, too, have felt good or bad about how my (dorky, quasi-1920s) haircut has looked on any given day. Suddenly I had this feeling of puffiness in my eyes that I get before tears well up.

Later that night, as I flossed, I thought about this response in me. It had bypassed all the obvious rational thoughts about how maybe the woman was a racist, homophobic, Q-Anon bigot, and so in no way deserved waves of pre-tear puffiness or hot chest aches. 

The response just hadn’t cared. It was mindless. It reminded me of film footage I’ve seen in which one monkey reaches out instinctively to comfort the suffering of another monkey, apparently not caring what monkey-ideologies the suffering monkey harbored. 

Here’s another thing it reminded me of. Years ago, I participated in a meditation retreat in this gorgeous old mansion in St. Paul. The retreat was led by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sherap Chodzin, and he shared a metaphor about the kind of compassion that comes up in us spontaneously, without calculation. 

Imagine you’re walking down the street in the winter and you see, in front of you, an old woman carrying two big bags of groceries in her arms. Then you see that she’s heading straight toward a big patch of glistening black ice. In that moment, Sherap Chodzin said, you would fly forward to help her, without a single thought. You wouldn’t think about her politics or about how helping her would add to your own good karma. You wouldn’t think about anything. 

You would be gripped by a mindless, primal reflex to help, to serve, because, in that moment, there would be no separation between you and the old lady. What was about to happen to her, would seem, in some indescribable way, like it was about to happen to you, too. Chodzin went on to say that, the more deeply we practiced the Buddha Way, the more situations in our lives will look – to us – like old ladies with bags of groceries heading for patches of black ice. 

So I don’t know. Maybe the way the suffering Trumper in the video hit me was one of those moments. Or maybe I was just being a monkey. 

In any case, it, the moment, whatever it was, passed quickly. We moved on to the third video and I laughed, along with Carolyn. As far as cleverly mean-spirited videos go, they were pretty creative and funny. But now, as I write this, I feel sad that that moment passed, and a subversive thrill runs through my body when I dare to imagine what a ruinous delightful mess it might make of things if my whole life were made of such moments.

Here are two passages from my Guru, Adi Da Samraj, that this moment brings to mind:

“Get straight. Overcome your own reaction… You can still discriminate and know when people are not right and so forth, but you don’t cease to love, you don’t become distorted by reaction. Reaction is ego. But you see, God Realization is about becoming liberated from all of your reaction. It’s not that you don’t know the difference between shit and shinola, but you utterly Transcend reaction, self-contraction – you utterly Transcend it. 

“…Then the infinite disposition of Love, of embrace, of compassion appears. And then it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what anybody ever did…You bless them. You help them to grow. You love them. You are willing to test them in love. You are willing to endure them. You’re willing to shout at them. But you Transcend all the limitations that humanity can animate. 

“Nobody deserves to be reacted to, in any absolute sense. Nobody and nothing. The Infinite Reality is Radiant, Infinite Love, all Free. All must be blessed. All must be treated with compassion. All must be healed. All must be Awakened…you see, it doesn’t make any difference what people do, ultimately. When the Heart is Awakened, then you do a different work. And as long as you’re reacting, you’re suffering the karmic bondage of egoity. And that’s really all there is to it. Freedom from that is God Realizing; dramatizing it is egoity. 

“You can suffer or you can love. You can complain or you can surrender. You can abuse or you can bless. But it’s really just that simple. And true maturity, God Realizing maturity, manifests great compassion, great love, great help, endures greatly…It’s not that I’m a fool and don’t know what people are doing. I’m just working with people to move them out of their suffering, their egoic disposition. …That’s what you’re growing toward, that disposition… 

“People are in a very difficult circumstance here, in a body that can experience delight, but which is gonna drop dead any moment here. And which is suffering all the time and is threatened all around. And they’re confused in their minds and they have no great experience and they’re just trying to work it out and do their best. And fundamentally most people don’t really have bad intentions. They may react, but they don’t really have bad intentions. They have good intentions – they may not do it too damn good, but they have good intentions. This is not paradise. This is a place where beings are in a profoundly difficult circumstance…

“So do not be stupid and cruel people…[Everyone is] fleshily presented, and dying…everyone who lives is dying and is confronted with the most incredible circumstance. All are deserving of your love and compassion, and also of your demand for the discipline of love beyond egoic ‘self-possession’, so that they too can enjoy the intuition of this Happiness.”

                                                                                                -Avatar Adi Da Samraj

You know how you could enjoy a moment of monkey compassion? Why, by subscribing to this very blog you are reading, that’s how! Praise be to you and the camel you rode in on!