Kindness? But Why Aldous?
Aldous Huxley was one of my first (non cowboy) heroes. I first read him when I was at school. We worked with a collection of…
Author: Richard Ingate
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Aldous Huxley was one of my first (non cowboy) heroes. I first read him when I was at school. We worked with a collection of…
Aldous Huxley was one of my first (non cowboy) heroes. I first read him when I was at school. We worked with a collection of his essays. Even as a dim teenager I knew I was in the presence of wisdom. Huxley was a philosopher and explorer of mysticism.
There is a famous quote attributed to him that came as a result of him being asked to sum up the most important lesson he had learned about life.
“It’s a bit embarrassing… to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try to be a little kinder.’ ”
(As quoted in Huston Smith, “Aldous Huxley–A Tribute,” The Psychedelic Review, (1964) Vol I, No.3, (Aldous Huxley Memorial Issue), p. 264-5
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley)
What if we were to take this seriously rather than as a soundbyte? How would your last few days be different if you had been a little kinder? This is not meant as a judgement that anyone is wrong for not being ‘kinder’. It is meant as a genuine question, how would your last few days be different if you had been a little kinder?
Is there any difference between being kinder to others and being kinder to yourself? How would you know when it was beneficial to be kinder, or not?
These are all important questions that get lost when we live according to soundbytes.
Perhaps when I think about myself I might consider what my rationale is for being kinder to myself. Why be kinder? It is not obvious that it is an advantage long term, certainly in the short term, it may be more comfortable.
With regard to being kinder to oneself, what does this mean? Do I get more pizza? Perhaps there is a sense of being gentle but not necessarily indulgent. The image that comes to mind is that of ‘playing a fish’. I have never been fishing so I am assuming this fantasy version to be reasonably accurate. The line is let out when the fish pulls too hard and is reeled in when the fish tires. The overall direction is towards the fisherman and is purposeful.
How does it make a difference to your conception of kindness if you consider it to be serving a purpose, a pre-chosen direction, a choice about how to be in the world? Maybe I will now sometimes also be ‘cruel to be kind’, for example, I could stop my enjoyment of a book or film an hour earlier so that I can get a better quantity of sleep – a factor that will impact on everything else that I do and experience. I might deprive myself of pizza in order to reduce my weight, but done with ‘tough love’ rather than as a punishment for being such a hopeless glutton. The same behaviour can arise from very different motivations.
How do you see ‘kindness’ with regard to others? I don’t really think ‘kindness’ means it is sufficient to make up reasons for other people’s bad behaviour, as if knowing the reason explains / excuses the bad behaviour. I do not think it does. I would suggest that one way to develop kindness with regard to others is to deliberately practice patience with regard to behaviour we do not like.
‘Patience’ here means to bear with without following our knee jerk reactiveness even though we may well feel it. We do not get too bent out of shape and respond from emotion. This presupposes a certain facility to engage with your own feelings.
Such kindness with regard to others also takes us out of our individual frame of reference (how it affects ME) and takes our human nature and shared human condition into account. Yes, people do really terrible things to other people for very self serving reasons. Furthermore, given the conditions, each one of us might be that person.
What does this mean with regard to being kind? Knowing that life has a dark side as well as a light side embeds you in a more inclusive and more explanatory reality. You can become more accustomed to a greater range of behaviour without losing your balance for as long, as well as having a greater acceptance of ‘what is’ as ‘what is’.
This does not suggest any agreement. Murdering a child, for example, is still a horrendous event, yet it is one that takes place within the whole potential of human nature, it is not that the laws of the cosmos have been broken in this instance, sadly. In short, a sense of kindness gives a context for the lifelong attempt to understand what ‘Life’ is about and live in some sort of accord with that investigation.
We live at a time of ‘mind hacks’ apps and supposedly simple and easy ways to do things that evolution and the great wisdom traditions have been so unaccountably tardy about.
The tarot card of the Fool is a card of possibility. Yes, you could crash and burn. Yes, you could fly. This is also life, is it not?
I would suggest that we are better off, even when we crash and burn, if we have a way of understanding what is happening to us, and hopefully more means of responding with psychological and spiritual agility, than only being able to get lost in the conditioned habits and memories that form so much of our experience.
I suspect that practices such as ‘kindness’ (or gratitude, for example) develop what they set out to develop. That is to say, you will be kinder if you practise kindness, but more than this, perhaps they also create conditions for a more general (deeper? higher?) more encompassing ‘wisdom’ to emerge which then also begins to add its shaping of our experience to our individual and community mixes.
What do you think? I write in order to find out what I think about things and am grateful for any responses that may help that process – you never know, it might just become a good conversation!
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