12. Freedom To Feel, Cry
“As spiritual and political beings we are all activists at heart,” Aung San Suu Kyi once said. “No one is outside of society. Not even the monks and nuns in our country. Our revolution includes them. It is about our freedom. That means everybody. We must see that nothing and no one is separate from this freedom. No one is an island in this world.”
When we accept the pure emotion of being a human without protective personas covering our heart, embracing our shared struggle for freedom — for everybody — rather my own struggle alone is often heart-breaking. The torment we see in the faces on the television news every day is staggering. The anguish is almost too much to bear.
But there it is, always before our eyes and in our hearts, and if our scope of freedom is to encompass the world — to become a global freedom — we must learn to feel otherness as an aspect of self.
In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s autobiography Night, he describes how, when taken as a young child to Auschwitz, he witnessed children being thrown into the cremation ovens alive. He explains how he rubbed his eyes in horror, attempting to wake up, thinking that what he was seeing wasn’t real.
I read recently that he still, seventy some years later, rubs his eyes as he did in Auschwitz when he sees the world’s atrocities. He can’t believe the horror he’s witnessing could actually be real. And we can be sure that his eyes have seen a lot of inhumanity.
The moment our consciousness goes beyond our own self-interest and begins to care about others and the world as an extension of ourselves, inevitably the heart will be forced to open, expand, and assimilate new dimensions.
Of course, it’s easy to talk about “embracing the world as an extension of self” but to lift off the veil of separation, even a little bit, and to actually feel others as self is an act of enormous courage. The idealism of compassionately embracing the world must be tempered with the wisdom to go slowly — one person at a time.