Mahayana Buzzkill?

Maybe it was an after effect from my Big Mind experience the day before (see here)... Yesterday morning as I rode the Piccadilly line into work, I noticed that I was enormously pleased with people. I was just sitting there on the train and everyone in the carriage with me just seemed simply marvelous to me. So I just sat there with a sort of bemused half smile looking at each person and finding them all beautiful. There was no sense of preference either. Each person was clearly individual, some were obviously more fashionable (as many Londoners tend to be) or conventionally beautiful, but all of them, even the frumpy, grumpy and ugly seemed somehow equally lovely yesterday morning. It was really quite a pleasant feeling, though I had to exert some mental discipline and not just stare at people smiling, as I'm sure it would probably feel creepy to them.

So, arriving at South Kensington I found that the feeling persisted as I rode the escalators up to the surface and walked along the pedestrian subway toward the museums and Imperial College. I was floating along in a pleasantly warm perspective, enjoying everything I saw. It wasn't the sort of emotionally intense experience I'd had the day before, but more just a pleasingly satisfied feeling. Everything seemed just really nice, even the damp grey drippy English morning.

Then, near the exit to the Natural History museum, I passed the gentleman sitting on a produce crate selling The Big Issue in his usual spot. I've probably passed this man hundreds of times on my way to work and never bought a copy of the magazine from him, and yesterday was no different, but almost as soon as I passed him the bubble burst. The glow faded, the cold rainy morning air replaced it, and suddenly people were just people, the world was just the world, and the day was just another morning on the way to work. And I knew instantly, in my own mind, that the reason was that I had noticed this guy on his crate and just passed him by. Somewhere inside me I had felt an urge to give this man a couple of quid for his magazine, and I hadn't acted on it.

This makes me wonder a bit now about the Bodhisattva vow. If this episode yesterday is a typical byproduct of transcendentalism, then is the Bodhisattva phenomenon actually a compulsion? I think perhaps it is. Indeed, I've thought this intellectually in the past, but now perhaps I have a more direct apprehension of how this works. Perhaps the sort of meditative exercise I subjected myself to on Tuesday acts to condition our brains to notice and act on these generous impulses by making us aware of our emotional need to belong in the world as a part of the whole. Perhaps when we feel plugged into a loving universe and then fail to act on a generous impulse, it separates us from that feeling of goodwill. The discontinuity between the impulse and the action breaks the spell and the gestalt is broken. The stereogram collapses into its random dot components and the vision is lost. Since the vision was tied into an emotional need, or sense of well-being, or tickling the pleasure centers of the brain, or however you want to view it, the bubble bursting is a come-down.

Is this the origin of the idea of sin? There is a school of thought that says that Sin is separation or distance from God. If I was someone who had been brought up and lived in the context of a heavily mythic theological system with a strong second-person sense of deity, then I might indeed have interpreted the last couple of days as direct apprehensions of God in the second person reaching into my 'soul.' Then the sudden removal of that feeling might indeed have felt very much like a rejection. Like the rebuke of an angry parent or lover. I might have been very likely to feel that I had sinned and needed to seek redemption. As it is, it felt more like a gestalt switch to me.

I bought a copy of the Big Issue from this gentleman this morning. I wasn't feeling the same bubble this morning, but the sense of karmic cause and effect had already been instilled. Actually, I have a stronger impulse to buy him a cup of tea, but that is a rather more complicated intersubjective transaction, and I am still a bit of a coward in that respect. Still, perhaps the impulse will act as an agent of growth. We will see.