who cares?
We care. A beautiful quality that begs to be understood. How so?
Day to day, caring has a specific direction. We usually care because we sense pain or the possibility of pain. We wish for the pain to go away. We seek a certain improvement over what is. We care because we want things to be different than they are.
Notice that caring tends to revolve ever so subtly around a central “me,” a personal self. With an agenda. We feel better when others feel better. We feel good about helping or healing or fixing. It’s human nature. It’s perhaps also a subtle form of control, however well-intentioned.
Where is this self? Can you find it? Caring that is outward seeking seeks an external change that is separate from an internal ‘me’. Caring compares and judges phenomenal conditions. But for who? So what? What’s wrong with pain? Or unhappiness? Phenomena come and go. They co-arise with each other. Can you find the separate ‘me’?
A litmus test: What if the object of my caring does not care about me? Zilch. Zero. What if the object of my care does not respond? Or disappoints in the way it responds? You see, we have certain expectations. It may be as simple as expecting a thank you, a bit of gratitude. Says who? In caring with expectations we ourselves believe we are separate entities that need to be cared for in certain ways! Oh, fragile the conditioned mind!
Our usual conditioned caring walks a familiar path. A path of reciprocity. Something has to come back to us. Something has to make the care “worthwhile.” Caring is measured in worth and value. There’s effort. It is something we humans do, beautiful as it is, well-intentioned as we are. But such conditioned caring lives in the world of appearances, in the duality of you and me. We are not non-attached. We believe in a separate you and me.
So what is it to care beyond the tricky veils of our seemingly innocent attachments? What is it to care when nothing, nada, comes “back” to the self? What is it to drop beyond the duality of me and you, of us and world, of expectations, the duality of appearances, the multiplicity of Reality’s infinite expressions?
What if caring is a way of being? It is because life is.
What if we can see caring as kindness? Neutral, open. A universal kindness.
What if we see in caring all that is as Kindred, Life? Indivisible.
What if caring is way of being that knows all that is as worthy, as its own heart and body?
No distinction. No direction. Just is. Kind. Reality. Silent. All-accepting. Presence.
What if caring does not seek to make things better while it flows? Like water.
Nothing to manipulate. No attachment. Only to express love. Love for the sake of Love.
What is essential is invisible to the eyes, the Little Prince says in St. Exupéry’s little novella. What if all phenomena we ‘take on’ intrinsically points to this Essence, this one Reality - where no thing exists, yet everything lives, complete?
Non-attachment doesn’t mean pulling away from life. Rather it means loving fully: without holding on, without rejecting, without clinging, without aversion. The heart full! Caring in its truest sense says: Yes. Nothing needs to be added. Or subtracted. The imperfections of the world are perfect in the Essence that knows. That we are. And so we act. And so we live and speak. And so we care: from Love, in Love, for Love. Silence.
Non-attachment is not a practice. Attachment simply falls away all by itself when we simply can be with what is and know that we are Reality without any need to change it. Things that seemed so terribly important spontaneously lose their hook when we are no longer caught in the veils of phenomena.
A singular dance of silent Love, where everything belongs and unfolds in perfection, even if our human eyes cannot see it. Can we be open to this possibility? Can you have the courage as well as clarity to experientially verify this?
Nisargadatta Maharaj: “Wisdom says I am nothing. Love says I am everything. In between my life flows.”
When caring is truly understood, it vanishes. and what reveals itself is not boredom, not indifference, but the depth and wonder and sheer unnamable beauty of life itself. What reveals itself in the dissolution of care is a pure, unadulterated, un-intervened dance of aliveness, vibrant, wild, unpredictable. When we are without preferences, we become silent. We no longer claim to know right or wrong. And simply experience what is. Let’s simply meet in Rumi’s field of grass, the field
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.”
credit: juan-pablo-rodriguez | unsplash
