Cynthia Bourgeault has a wonderful book called The Wisdom Jesus. She devotes a portion of a chapter to this “great commandment” (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27). I want to quote extensively what she says because I think it gets to the heart of compassion—that when we see clearly we have no choice but to love others as self because self is other and other is self. Until we realize that we are all in this together, we will not realize that love of others is love of self and, perhaps more importantly, harm to others is harm to self. Understood in this way, Jesus’s admonition to “love your enemies” is easier to understand and live out—enemies are an extension of self just as neighbors are. We—self, other, neighbor, enemy—are all one, reflections of the same light.
Here’s how Bourgeault says it. Beginning with the recognition that there is no separation between human and divine (as Jesus says “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you”), she continues:
No separation between human and human is an equally powerful notion—and equally challenging. One of the most familiar of Jesus’s teachings is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” But we almost always hear that wrong. We hear “love your neighbor as much as yourself.” (And of course, the next logical question then becomes, “But I have to love me first, don’t I, before I can love my neighbor?”) If you listen closely to Jesus’s teaching, however, there is no “as much as” in there. It’s just “Love your neighbor as yourself”—as a continuation of your very own being. It’s a complete seeing that your neighbor is you. There are not two individuals out there, one seeking to better herself at the price of the other, or to extend charity to the other; there are simply two cells of one great Life. Each of them is equally precious and necessary. And as these two cells flow into one another, experiencing that one Life from the inside, they discover that “laying down one’s life for another” is not a loss of one’s self but a vast expansion of it—because the indivisible reality of love is the only True Self.
These are the key points of a very radical teaching—not only light years ahead of its time but way ahead of our own as well. . . .
In a similar spirit, the Buddha in the Metta Sutta (Discourse on Loving-Kindness), says:
Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cultivate limitless love for all living beings.
The mother-child imagery here is critical because the child is, literally-physically, an extension of self—part of mother, same as mother, is mother. Buddha and Jesus both say that we must love others because they are we, you are I, I am you. To do otherwise only harms self.
The 20th century Jewish theologian-philosopher Martin Buber conveyed a similar message in his seminal work I and Thou. Buber says that are two ways for self to relate to other: I-Thou and I-it. With I-it, the self relates to other as subject-object, but with I-Thou the self relates to other as subject-subject. I-Thou is a relationship rooted in unity of being, while I-it is rooted in separateness, detachment, and division.
I-Thou is how The Divine relates to The Human. And if we, as self, can relate to other as I-Thou, then we can touch the Divine—The Kingdom of Heaven will indeed reside within us.
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