I’ve often gone back to a time a few years ago when I was sitting on a
concrete bench in Washington DC’s Dupont Circle. I was meeting a friend there and
had arrived early, and so spent a good half an hour just observing. I looked
around and saw maybe two hundred other people in this small park. As you might
guess, there were many sizes, shapes, colors, and ages. Some were playing with
frisbees, some with those little “hackie-sacks”. Others were in-line skating,
and a few jogged past. A juggler. Some were talking softly, others almost
yelling their conversation across a distance. Many sat silently. All of these
distinctions are important in some way or another, but not important to our
basic goodness. And that is all I see when I look on such an accumulation of
bodies. Our basic goodness. I’ve since discovered that in the ancient Shambala
tradition of Tibet there is something
known as “drala”. This natural wisdom recognizes the basic goodness of
everyone, a truth found in other spiritual traditions as well. The drala
principle knows that our eyes send their information to our heart, where the
true “seeing” takes place. The eyes are a link in the process of seeing, but
they do not see all. The heart does the real seeing. This is not just the
collection of tissue that pumps our blood
we are talking about here, but the feelings we know as the heart. That
is where we see the basic goodness. It is where we can appreciate this world
that our bodily senses perceive. Think for a moment, would you rather be a
person without eyes or without that heart?
Then I wondered as I sat on the bench what some of my friends would
think as they looked at this scene. What would they see? I say my friends
because they are people that I know something about, so I tried to figure out
what they might think in that situation. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know if they
would see what I see. First of all, what would be their sensory perceptions?
Although most of us think there is one world that we all live in, our corporeal
senses receive different information from that same world. As Bertrand Russell
put it, “…the sense-data are private to each separate person…” What one person
sees at any given moment, the other person may not see. And then once the
sensations are taken in, how are they interpreted by the accumulation of all
the other sensory intake of a lifetime? What philosophy guides their hearts? I
keep returning to that picture of Dupont Circle and wondering. This is the
picture of the basic goodness in my mind, because that is what I saw then and
always see as I watch my partners in life passing through. And I remember I had
a subtle but real smile as I sat there that day as I thought of the tail end of
a paragraph from Saint Paul (he was in a Roman prison at the time); …if there
is anything worthy of praise, dwell on these
things”. Drala.
7/9/99