Common Wisdom, Common Ground—First Contemplation
First Contemplation
We begin with wonder and bliss. That’s where our lives begin, where life itself begins. Still, it’s a somewhat scandalous way to start off, especially if you’re experiencing a lot of suffering, or if you’re aware of the many kinds of suffering in our world—or if you think you don’t deserve happiness and instead deserve to suffer. You aren’t alone. More people than you might imagine hold a conscious or unconscious belief that they don’t deserve happiness, that they may even deserve to suffer. A lot of people find joy rather intimidating, and we’d rather hang on to the suffering we know than leap into unknown wonder and bliss.
Rest assured we will get to suffering soon enough. But we should know that philosophy or LoveWisdom offers the possibility of genuine happiness, no matter how awful and undeserving we may secretly think ourselves. LoveWisdom (philo/sophy, love/wisdom) offers so much happiness that we would rightly call it bliss—as long as we keep things straight. “Bliss” does not mean “doped up,” addle-brained, insensitive, unrealistic, out of touch, “otherworldly,” escapist, or anything like that. LoveWisdom only promises bliss if we are skillful and realistic in our lives—which means creative and imaginative too, even to the point of going beyond what others think possible—but realistic nevertheless, for when we accomplish what others deem impossible, we have shown how realistic we are and how unrealistic they have been.
This all seems rather important when we live in a world profoundly shaped by a nation dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness”. What if the founding fathers got it wrong: We shouldn’t pursue it, but rather we should see that we are it. This might not make sense at first.
For now, the point is that we can be happy. We can be at peace. We can feel profoundly alive and alove. We live in a cosmos of great wonder, and we can come to know its magical character, intimately. We need to understand that these are possibilities for us, living possibilities that we can envision and then make real for ourselves and others. We need to understand that wisdom, love, and beauty are freely available to us—they are our very essence, and the essence of the cosmos—and therefore we can truly enjoy our lives, and even love them, and love all the beings we share this world with (no matter how unworthy of such love and joy we may feel, and many of us, especially in the western world, feel secretly or not-so-secretly unworthy of love and joy).
We might not truly know any of this (or, we may “know” our unworthiness so well, and “know” so much about reality that we are sure we can never experience wisdom, love, and beauty). I myself could not have imagined the possibilities of wonder and bliss that LoveWisdom can make available to us. Many things—including the most important things which LoveWisdom makes available to us—sound like nonsense when we first hear about them, and our ego can even take offense, rejecting them outright.
This is why many philosophers don’t lead with bliss. Talk of bliss can sound silly, nonsensical, or even a bit frightening, and “reason” (or whatever we want to call our ordinary thinking) may bristle and fight, or just run away. But, when we experience the heart of LoveWisdom, which means experiencing such things as serenity, wonder, compassion, and bliss, we experience them as the least silly things in the World—that LoveWisdom itself is the least silly and the most needful thing, the thing everyone hungers for deeply, the thing that life itself depends on.
LoveWisdom belongs to you, and you belong to It. You were made to experience its beauty, its heart of wonder and bliss. And I think it’s a mistake to fail to make this clear. The dominant culture was not founded by sages, but by people who studied LoveWisdom in a degraded state. Most of them attained limited wisdom at best, and so, in the case of the United States, they codified racism, slavery, patriarchy, and elitism into the founding documents (the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution), and made sure to limit democracy and equality (and thus limit the proliferation of wisdom, love, and beauty) in the new republic.
We should with great passion correct the errors of their ways, and correct the inherited burden of trauma, the inherited ethical responsibility we all bear to make things right in the world. Therefore, we begin with wonder and bliss, and with our own innate potential to realize wisdom, love, and beauty—to become more wise, more loving, and more beautiful than many of our ancestors, and thus to do right by them as we heal the wounds they both suffered and created through ignorance, as well as healing the wounds of the many victims of that ignorance, wounds that have come down to us still open and painful in the present day.
Breathe. Relax. We have time to enjoy our life and to make things right, time to move forward in a good way, time to delight in the beauty and mystery in poetry that expresses the beauty and mystery in life and love—for we will need poetic vision to make things right in our own souls and in the soul of the world.
Dark young pine, at the center of the earth originating,
I have made your sacrifice.
Whiteshell, turquoise, abalone beautiful,
Jet beautiful, pyrite beautiful, blue pollen beautiful, reed pollen beautiful, your sacrifice I have made.
This day your child I have become, I say.
Watch over me.
Hold your hand before me in protection.
Stand guard for me, speak in defense of me.
As I speak for you, speak for me.
As you speak for me, so I will speak for you.
May it be beautiful before me,
May it be beautiful behind me,
May it be beautiful below me,
May it be beautiful above me,
May it be beautiful all around me.
I am restored in beauty,
I am restored in beauty,
I am restored in beauty,
I am restored in beauty.
~Navajo Prayer
The great sea
frees me, moves me,
as a strong river carries a weed.
Earth and her strong winds
move me, take me away,
and my soul is swept up in joy.
~Uvuvnak, Iglulik Eskimo woman
Wonder and bliss (or at least a basic joyfulness) are not only possible, but are the very point and purpose of a spiritual/philosophical approach to life. Indeed, they are not only the goal, but also the path, and the starting point. Wonder and bliss are the altogether experience of wisdom, love, and beauty. The experience is yours. LoveWisdom is a come-and-see thing—you taste it yourself, touch it yourself, beyond words and ideas. No one can explain it, but you can always discover it any moment.
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