Verbal simplifications lead to a lack of compassion. Since compassion is the perception of someone as fully human, with all the magnificence of human capacities, it follows that lack of compassion is the perception of someone as less than fully human. Prejudiced people see others as being constituted by a name, and the fullness of their humanity is limited to that name - limey, dame, broad, faggot, bum, low-class, dumbbell, criminal, wimp, loser, failure. When they reject or harm or even kill such a person, they are rejecting or harming or killing what to them is a name, not someone fully human. A good example of this kind of thinking can be found in a passage in
Innocence Under the Elms by Louise Dickinson Rich (Louise Dickinson Rich,
Innocence Under the Elms (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1955),
18). "When I was young, one who Drank - and Drinking with a capital D
meant imbibing anything at all containing alcohol and carried inexorably in
its wake delirium tremens, unspeakable vices, the squandering of
hard-earned wages, the pitiful cries of hungry children and brutalized wives,
filth, squalor, poverty, and anything else reprehensible that happens to
occur to you - one who Drank, then, was ipso facto an unnatural monster."
In Rich's day, one who Drank was a monster through and through. Compassion should not be confused with pity. Compassion enriches the understanding, whereas pity is emotionally draining. I have spent much of my life pitying my mother. "Feeling for her" was not something that I should have had to do. As Emerson said, "Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer. If not, attend your own work." Once, when a hairdresser cried on Rita's shoulder, Rita rejected pity and said, "First do your job. Then you can cry." Words, then, are perfect. A word is designed to represent what it
names. It is in the nature of a word to omit the complex reality of anything it
names. In contrast, reality, other than words, is always imperfect. Every
person is imperfect. There is no person who can be always right, never make
a mistake, be perfectly beautiful, understand everything, or know
everything. A person who appears to be always in the right, never make a
mistake, understand everything, and know everything is pretending.
Saying this does not reduce the value of words, and it does not reduce
the value of reality outside of words. Rather, it elevates them both by
recognizing the difference. The fact that words exist in the mind and only in
the mind makes the value of the mind all the greater. It is sometimes thought that computers are a model for the mind.
Computers operate differently altogether. They work using binary numbers
sequentially. There is no evidence that the brain uses binary numbers. Even
if it did, the conversion to thoughts in the mind would still remain a mystery
of life. Nevertheless, there are obvious parallels between a computer and the processes of life, including the mind. The binary numbers are coded, much as the genes in DNA are coded. Both a computer and the brain can use logic. Obsessions in the brain are similar to loops in computer programming. However, why it is that certain sequences of the building blocks of DNA (genes) produce certain effects is a mystery, a secret of life.
The human mind can operate in two ways: it can be engaged with reality, or it can be disengaged. When our mind is engaged, we are paying attention to what we are now doing - we are minding the store. If the mind wanders, someone might say, "Mind what you are doing. Don't be so absent-minded" or "Be mindful of what you are doing." When our mind is disengaged, we are fantasizing, imagining, composing, remembering, planning, intending, . . .
An unwelcome thought/image/memory is a reflection of the real episode. It is a function of the continuity of time to keep it in the mind as a part of the present. Although the tying together of the past with the future is found throughout existence, in human beings it is the mind that is the seat of unwanted holdovers from the past. It is a remarkable feature of human life, unlike other life, that ideas and feelings in the mind can be addressed. The burden of past trauma, humiliations, failures, and rejections can be lightened. The idea that feelings are irremediably connected to past events can be seen to be an illusion. It is the mind that connects feelings to memories of past events. The occurrence that is now in the past is no longer existent. What exists is something in the mind. I can address it: "That feeling is a thing. It is only itself. The past is irreversible. Outside of the mind, only the facts remain. Worrying cannot reverse it." With our understanding that mind is a feature of life, the human mind then takes its place alongside all the other minds in Nature/life. Certainly, we human beings have our special mental abilities, but so do other creatures - the ability of birds and monarch butterflies and salmon to find their way across thousands of miles and the ability of animals that know where they buried their winter provisions (sometimes in dozens of places underground), for example. We human beings are animals, pure and simple.
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