My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
The cost for believing that no one is better than me is grasping that I’m not better than anyone else. The instant I slide away from that position, my ego will measure the rest of the world according to my standards (which no one has any obligation to measure up to) and suddenly I look pretty damned good. And most of the world would look like sickly, lying, damaged goods. They would look like retarded children too deluded to see that they are too sick to have healthy relationships, too lazy to lose weight, too stupid to build a satisfying career.
I mean this very very seriously. As you dig deeper into yourself, the temptation to say "Hey! If you’re not doing this there’s something wrong with you!" is fantastically high.
What stops me? Basically, knowing that no matter how far and how fast you run, everyone is the same distance from the horizon. That’s not to say I’m totally morally relativistic: no child molester is gonna baby sit my son.
Nor does it mean that I excuse all behaviors. Do I love my enemy? Sure. Will I blow your head off if you break into my house? You bet. But I won’t be angry with you about it.
Hmmm. So, without compassion, understanding, forgiveness, not only do I lose perspective on myself, become incapable of protecting myself from my Ego’s frantic attempts to preserve itself, but I’d isolate myself from most of mankind, hallucinating that because I score high in these three important but artificial categories, I am somehow better than other people. And I’d hate myself for the black blood that connects me to the po’ black folks. And hate and despise white folks because with all of the advantages I craved, and cried myself to sleep as a child for not having, most of them really ain’t that much, and have a fantastic capacity to delude themselves into believing they and their culture are superior.
No. There is no joy down that road. So…people are people to me. Forgiving others means the ability to forgive myself. Seeing the way we have all fallen short of our potential keeps me sane. Seeing myself in every human being I meet fills me with love and compassion.
And frankly, when I meet people who are balanced in these three ways, they seem to be more open than average, more accepting of the flaws of others, less judgmental even as they strive for excellence, and encourage it in others.
I think that honesty is the hardest thing. The first thing. And the first thing to go when people are in pain. If I can forgive myself for my past sins, and move forward toward my future, I must first see how we’re all in this mess together.
