The complexity of life can mask its poignancy. The web of daily tasks and events can seem so manifold, so knotty and tangled, that the deeper richness contained within them gets overshadowed, lost in the labyrinth of scheduling, obscured by the preoccupation with efficiency. The ongoing attempt to stay on track, to balance multiple demands for time, eventually conditions us to accept dizziness as normal, and multiple distractions as a daily inevitability.

We get good at screening calls, scanning emails, and multi-tasking. We grow used to over-stimulation, resigned to clutter and excess. Instead of periods of busyness, we find that the details of each opportunity pile up like snow during a very long winter. Each flake seems so small and harmless, lovely on its own as it drifts from the sky, but when there are several feet of those flakes piled up, those little details become a blanket of obfuscation.

Are you longing for a Christmas break in the “detail deluge”, a holiday respite from the snow load of particulars and possessions? Maybe you have begun to realize that the warmth and security that goes along with procuring the necessities of life can also be accompanied by the colder precipitation of multiple possessions. Perhaps in the bracing reality of making a living you have lost touch with the warm pulse of life. Don’t worry, the pulse is still there, still rhyming each moment with a rhythm of meaning. All those details, meetings, appointments, tasks, and obligations can be recognized as the colorful paper, wrappings, and trappings that surround subtler gifts. Understood in this way, each busy life can provide a steady supply of hidden presents.

Many wise traditions know the importance of finding a balance between action and stillness. One way of achieving that balance is by a simple yet profound way of living called ‘Wabi Sabi’.

It is a way that is natural, drawing close to the real world, and relaxing perpetually into beautiful patterns that exist there. Wabi Sabi is a way of life that appreciates and accepts complexity while at the same time values simplicity. It nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. To accept these realities is to accept contentment as the maturation of happiness, and to acknowledge that clarity and grace can be found in genuine unvarnished existence. Filled with subtlety and depth, this way is a river flowing toward and away from you, and always within you.

–Richard Powell [passage picked from Awakin.]

I have a friend who is an artist, and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “Look how beautiful it is” and I’ll agree. And he says: “you see, as an artist I can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe, although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.

At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there. The complicated actions, which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions. The inner structure, also the processes, the fact that the colors and the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting. It means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Is this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which with science, knowledge, only adds to the excitement, and mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we are going, what the meaning of the universe is, and so on, then I think you could easily become disillusioned and look for some mystic answer to these problems. How a scientist can take a mystic answer, I don’t know, the whole spirit is to understand… Well, never mind that, I mean I don’t understand that.

The way I think of it is that we are exploring, we’re trying to find out as much as we can about the world. People say to me “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No I’m not, I’m just looking to find out more about the world, and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it. That would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers, and we’re just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that’s the way it is. But whatever way it comes out, nature is there and she’s going to come out the way she is. Therefore, when we go to investigate it, we shouldn’t pre-decide what it is we’re trying to do except to find out more about it.

You see, one thing is: I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things. By being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I could tell possible. It doesn’t frighten me. And so altogether I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple, too local, to provincial. The Earth, he came to the Earth! _One_ of the aspects of God came to the Earth, mind you. And look at what’s out there, it isn’t in proportion.

Anyway, it’s no use arguing, I can’t argue it. I’m just trying to tell you: with the scientific view, with my father’s view that we should look to see what’s true and what may not be true. Once you start doubting, which to me is a very fundamental part of my soul, is to doubt, and to ask. When you doubt and ask, it gets a little harder to believe.

–Richard Feynman. Listen to Richard’s voice from the newest Feynman  Series‘ videos [Creative comic above by Dharma Comics ;-)]

In the turnover from the personal to the impersonal, the clear and truly loving, we face a definite turnover of our very understanding of what integrity is. In the exact same way as the definition of Love stands to be corrected along with the purification of Heart.

In the early steps of Life, we are faced with the task and responsibility of developing personal integrity. An integrity, which for starters becomes built on a moral code, to which we become hostages bound to be true to, due to the fact of needing love. The integrity which is based on personality is not true integrity. It is a fear-based conclusion, which as the outset ensures our very survival and belonging. At best a necessary step – of learning the base of right and wrong, according to being a straight person.

Once we meet up with the fact of Truth and surrender, we are confronted with the limitations of the do’s and don’ts hidden in the personal integrity along with its in-accuracy of being based on the personal- and thereby an individuals agenda. True integrity, on the other hand, is based on fidelity to Truth.

In embracing Life our fidelity slides; from that of being true to the personal aspect of ensuring love for ourselves; by acting according to the moral code necessary for self-preservation, to being true to that, which has- and carries the largest possible perspective of the totality of Love and highest benefit and therein the clarity of Truth. [...]

It shows as continuously finding ourselves standing at the crossroads of making conscious choices – not according to what we want, but according to what is true and what we hear in listening to Hearts pure Will as the conscious and Truth-supporting choice. It also means meeting up with the personal pain of letting go of what we personally and previously have found pleasure in, merely for the fact of chosing honesty of Truth over gameplay.  [...]

Dedication to Truth ensures operation of action, thought and speech according to willing Truth and pure Life rather than wanting pleasure.

In letting go and taking responsibility and thereby the consequence for our Life, the Truth of/in us grows stronger. It amounts to large personal sacrifice over time and as we cut the arms, legs and head off of our ego, but in the dedication to Truth, our every step is celebrated across the entirety of Existence and all the way into the Silence of Truth. [...]

The people willing to meet- and walk with you in Truth will face the meeting with their own responsibility, fears and pain rising due to their ignorance… And the ones who deny to, will disappear. The outcome of this is not up to you. Your only task is to stay clear and become clearer.

The ego might (will) try to dance in trying to keep something alive, which is dying. As the result attempts at holding on are likely to occur. Watch yourself closely and avoid increasing the pain of letting go due to denial of the outcome. It is a fine balance – between quitting on the games, taking the blow and staying open and present.

Be aware of facing- and dissolving your beliefs and conclusions in catching the movement of anything attempting to manipulate- or defend itself based on wanting, rather than letting go based on dedication and love.

In embracing Truth, you will – at some point and as your demand for Truth grows – reach the impossibility of internally compromising and ”meeting half-way”. The very grounds of the conventionally understood integrity will crumble and fall to the delight of facing all of that, which clings to belief- and identification in you. That which used to jump onboard with games, becomes silent as the grave. [...]

In staying with Truth, Life will assist your letting go by providing exactly what is needed. Not according to what you think you know or want, but according to admittance to the fact of not knowing- and embrace of what is supposed to be.

The dance with the world becomes based on being honest. Being true. And it does so in our quitting on our own games as well as in loosing our will to play them with others – in becoming loving enough for everyone to deserve your greatest openness and honesty. In wanting Nothing (Truth) no compromise will appear. [...]

We must learn to love our Self in the way, which turns all loneliness into aloneness and thereby makes the principle of Love/Life/God permeate through not only our being with people, but through our being alone. When we are nolonger affraid to be alone, we will not bend backwards in ego-games to cling-, attain- nor constantly be together. We can be together, but we need not. We can be alone, but we need not.

As the personal games vanish, our being together is no longer about- or based on living personal lives. The whole game of attempting to be someone in relation to someone else is replaced by living side by side in the surrender to Life and in allowing whatever Life suggests of ”further” movement in supporting its own purification and unfolding.

Integrity is being true to That. Not to personal contracts. All personal contracts – of ownership, of respect based on self-preservation or self-protection must be torn. Be torn to the very unavoidable fact of Truth.

– by Aisha Salem in Integrity. [Creative comic above by Dharma Comics ;-)]

We were hunters and foragers.

The frontier was everywhere.

We were bounded only by the Earth, and the ocean, and the sky.

The open road still softly calls.

Our little terraqueous globe is the madhouse of those hundred, thousand, millions of worlds.

We who cannot even put our own planetary home in order.

Riven with rivalries and hatreds.

Are we to venture out into space?

By the time we’re ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passaged of so many generations will have changed us. Necessity will have changed us. We’re an adaptable species.

It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses.

More confident, far seeing, capable, and prudent. For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.

What new wonders undreamt of in our time will we have wrought in another generation? And another?

How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the end of the next century? And the next millennium?

Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the Solar System and beyond will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth.

They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies.

They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of our raw potential once was.

How perilous our infancy.

How humble our beginnings.

How many rivers we had to cross before we found our way…

–Carl Sagan in The Pale Blue Dot. Listen to Carl’s own voice in this Sagan Series‘ video [Creative comic above by Dharma Comics ;-)]

The truth is, your heart is already and always free.

The truth is, that as you rest your attention more and more into the love that you are, prior to all thoughts, emotions, and sensations – the more this love seems to grow.

It was here all along, but your attention was elsewhere.

And as your attention dwells more and more in this love-filled awareness, you discover that freedom was always here.

The painful emotion, the negative thought, the unwanted sensation – all arise within this. When your attention is caught up with the stories in your mind or your experience out there, you fail to notice this awareness – the peaceful stillness – in which they arise.

Emotional contraction feels like your heart has closed, and pain feels like heart-break. But when you rest attention in awareness – in the heart, an effortless acceptance arises.

What seemed unbearable is now free to dance. What seemed closed is free to open. And what seemed contracted is free to expand.

Everything is welcome here. Love sees no strangers. Your heart turns nothing away.

This is your true nature. This is meditation. The silence of the heart. [...]

To all truth seekers, heart warriors, and path forgers – I have a wish:

I do not wish for utopia, where anger and grief have no place
I wish for human suffering to be embraced in the arms of love
So that we may taste peace once again
I do not wish only to be happy
I wish to embrace all my pain
So that I may find freedom, even in the midst of it
I do not wish for perfection
I wish to see through the eyes of love
So that I may welcome even that which repels me
I do not wish for everything I desire
I wish for inner fulfillment
So I no longer seek temporary satisfaction
I do not wish to like everyone
I wish to cultivate compassion and understanding
So that I may live in peace with the people I encounter
I do not wish that everybody loves me,
I wish for people to see through our differences,
To find the deeper place, where we are all the same
And I do not wish for world peace,
I wish for people to make peace with themselves
So that a peaceful way of being can transform our world.

In turning within you serve humanity. In serving humanity you serve love. Love is who you are. You are love, you are love, you are love. ♥

–Georgia Simone in Don’t Liberate Your Heart and the Love Manifesto.

It’s time to upgrade our view of love.

First and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force. As for all positive emotions, the inner feeling love brings you is inherently and exquisitely pleasant — it feels extraordinarily good, the way a long, cool drink of water feels when you’re parched on a hot day. Yet far beyond feeling good, a micro-moment of love, like other positive emotions, literally changes your mind. It expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self. The boundaries between you and not-you — what lies beyond your skin — relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others — really see them, wholeheartedly — springs open. Love can even give you a palpable sense of oneness and connection, a transcendence that makes you feel part of something far larger than yourself.

Love, like all emotions, surfaces like a distinct and fast-moving weather pattern, a subtle and ever-shifting force.  And the new take on love that I want to share with you is this: Love blossoms virtually any time two or more people — even strangers — connect over a shared positive emotion, be it mild or strong.  

Odds are, if you were raised in a Western culture, you think of emotions as largely private events. You locate them within a person’s boundaries, confined within their mind and skin. When conversing about emotions, your use of singular possessive adjectives betrays this point of view. You refer to ‘my anxiety,’ ‘his anger,’ or ‘her interest.’ Following this logic, love would seem to belong to the person who feels it. Defining love as positivity resonance challenges this view. Love unfolds and reverberates between and among people — within interpersonal transactions — and thereby belong to all parties involved, and to the metaphorical connective tissue that binds them together, albeit temporarily.  More than any other positive emotion, then, love belongs not to one person, but to pairs or groups of people. It resides within connections.

Perhaps most challenging of all, love is neither lasting nor unconditional. The radical shift we need to make is this: Love, as your body experiences it, is a micro-moment of connection shared with another.  And decades of research now shows that love, seen as these micro-moments of positive connection, fortifies the connection between your brain and your heart and makes you healthier.  [...]  It can seem surprising that an experience that lasts just a micro-moment can have any lasting effect on your health and longevity. Yet there’s an important feedback loop at work here, an upward spiral between your social and your physical well-being. That is, your micro-moments of love not only make you healthier, but being healthier also builds your capacity for love. Little by little, love begets love by improving your health. And health begets health by improving your capacity for love.

–Barbara Frederickson, in Love 2.0 [passage picked from Awakin. Creative comic above by Dharma Comics ;-)]

In honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memory we also acknowledge nonviolence as a truly powerful weapon to achieve equality and liberation. [...]

Dr. King’s entire life was an example of power that nonviolence brings to bear in the real world. It is an example that inspired much of the philosophy and strategy of the farm workers’ movement. This observance of Dr. King’s death gives us the best possible opportunity to recall the principles with which our struggle has grown and matured. [...]

The first principle of nonviolent action is that of non-cooperation with everything humiliating. [...]

We are convinced that nonviolence is more powerful than violence. Nonviolence supports you if you have a just and moral cause. Nonviolence provides the opportunity to stay on the offensive. If we resort to violence then one of two things will happen: either the violence will be escalated and there will be many injuries and perhaps deaths on both sides, or there will be total demoralization of the workers. Nonviolence has exactly the opposite effect. If, for every violent act committed against us, we respond with nonviolence, we attract people’s support. We can gather the support of millions who have a conscience and would rather see a nonviolent resolution to problems. We are convinced that when people are faced with a direct appeal from the poor struggling nonviolently against great odds, they will react positively. The people [in the part of the Planet we call the U.S.] and people everywhere still yearn for justice. It is to that yearning that we appeal. [...]

Most people don’t understand the power of nonviolence and tend to be amazed by the whole idea. Those who have been involved in bringing about change and see the difference between violence and nonviolence are firmly committed to a lifetime of nonviolence, not because it is easy or because it is cowardly, but because it is an effective and very powerful way. [...]

It’s amazing how people can get so excited about a rocket to the Moon and not give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease. When the poor share some of the power that the affluent now monopolize, we will give a damn. [...]

Kindness and compassion toward all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people. Racism, economic deprival, dog fighting and cock fighting, bull fighting and rodeos are cut from the same fabric: violence. Only when we have become nonviolent toward all life will we have learned to live well ourselves. [...]

As one looks at the millions of acres in this country that have been taken out of agricultural production; and at the millions of additional acres that have never been cultivated; and at the millions of people who have moved off the farm to rot and decay in the ghettoes of our big cities; and at all the millions of hungry people at home and abroad; does it not seem that all these people and things were somehow made to come together and serve one another? If we could bring them together, we could stem the mass exodus of rural poor to the big city ghettoes and start it going back the other way; teach them how to operate new farm equipment; and put them to work on those now uncultivated acres to raise food for the hungry. [...]

Farm workers are involved in the planting and the cultivation and the harvesting of the greatest abundance of food known in this society. They bring in so much food to feed you and me and the whole country and enough food to export to other places. It’s ironic and tragic that those who till the soil, cultivate and harvest the fruits, vegetables, and other foods that fill your tables with abundance, after they make this tremendous contribution, they don’t have any money or any food left for themselves. [...]

I have met many, many farm workers and friends who love justice and who are willing to sacrifice for what is right. They have a quality about them that reminds me of the beatitudes. They are living examples that Jesus’ promise is true: they have been hungry and thirsty for righteousness and they have been satisfied. They are determined, patient people who believe in life and who give strength to others. They have given me more love and hope and strength than they will ever know. [...]

Our very lives are dependent, for sustenance, on the sweat and sacrifice of the campesinos. Children of farm workers should be as proud of their parents’ professions as other children are of theirs. It is not enough to teach our young people to be successful… so they can realize their ambitions, so they can earn good livings, so they can accumulate the material things that this society bestows. Those are worthwhile goals. But it is not enough to progress as individuals while our friends and neighbors are left behind. [...]

Thus, demonstrations and marches, strikes and boycotts are not only weapons against the growers, but our way of avoiding the senseless violence that brings no honor to any class or community. The boycott, as Gandhi taught, is the most nearly perfect instrument of nonviolent change, allowing masses of people to participate actively in a cause. The strike and the boycott, they have cost us much. What they have not paid us in wages, better working conditions, and new contracts, they have paid us in self-respect and human dignity. [...]

But when victory comes through violence, it is a victory with strings attached. If we beat the growers at the expense of violence, victory would come at the expense of injury and perhaps death. Such a thing would have a tremendous impact on us. We would lose regard for human beings. Then the struggle would become a mechanical thing. When you lose your sense of life and justice, you lose your strength.

The greater the oppression, the more leverage nonviolence holds. Violence does not work in the long run and if it is temporarily successful, it replaces one violent form of power with another just as violent. People suffer from violence. Examine history. Who gets killed in the case of violent revolution? The poor, the workers. The people of the land are the ones who give their bodies and don’t really gain that much for it. We believe it is too big a price to pay for not getting anything. Those who espouse violence exploit people. To call men to arms with many promises, to ask them to give up their lives for a cause and then not produce for them afterwards, is the most vicious type of oppression.

We know that most likely we are not going to do anything else the rest of our lives except build our union. For us there is nowhere else to go. Although we would like to see victory come soon, we are willing to wait. In this sense, time is our ally. We learned many years ago that the rich may have money, but the poor have time.

It has been our experience that few men or women ever have the opportunity to know the true satisfaction that comes with giving one’s life totally in the nonviolent struggle for justice. Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of these unique servants and from him we learned many of the lessons that have guided us. For these lessons and for his sacrifice for the poor and oppressed, Dr. King’s memory will be cherished in the hearts of the farm workers forever. [...]

If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s house and eat with her… The people who give you their food give you their heart.

–César Chávez excepts from He Showed Us The Way, April 4th, 1978 and Education Of the Heart

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Otto Adolf Eichmann trial –a Nazi lieutenant colonel who, because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, was given the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe, and later faced trial on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes– was that a psychiatrist examined him, in the 1960′s, and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.

If all the Nazis had been psychotics their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, “well-balanced,” unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well. He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good appetite, or so it seems. It all comes under the heading of duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience. Eichmann was devoted to duty and proud of his job.

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.

It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missile, and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will he suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake. We can no longer assume that because a man is “sane” he is therefore in his “right mind.” The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be “sane” in the limited sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly “adjusted.” God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.

The “sanity” of modern humans is about as useful to us as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If we were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of our absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of our survival. But if we are sane, too sane … perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally “sane.”

–Thomas Merton from Raids on the Unspeakable [Creative comic above by Dharma Comics ;-)]

Initiation Song from the Finders Lodge

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be your mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

–Ursula LeGuin in Always Coming Home [Picture from global oneness project]

A friend of mine, at the end of a retreat, offered a provocative reflection that intrigued and inspired me. After looking intensively at her inner experience for nine days of meditation and seeing many of her life choices in a brand new light, she commented, “If you really want to be a rebel, practice kindness.” [...]

I think she was absolutely right about kindness and rebellion.

The world may tell us to grab as much as we want, and we might think that the audacity of rebelliousness is to grab even more with impunity, but how about being really radical and questioning how much we need? Conventional wisdom may be that retribution displays strength and can summarily bring an end to conflicts, but how about taking a leap and challenging ourselves to a whole new meaning of resolution based on mutuality and caring? The easy way may be to turn away and distract ourselves form the distress and suffering of others, but how about being daring enough to pay attention? Our conditioning may tell us we don’t need anybody, but how about taking a real look at life and noticing that we are all entwined in a fabric of interdependence, then being willing to risk acting accordingly?

Although in current times there are some common connotations of morality as expressing fear of life or prudishness, in fact a commitment to ethics is a commitment to living life in the most free, most loving, most expansive sense. As the philosopher George Santayana said, “Morality is the desire to lessen suffering in the world.” Living in a way that doesn’t perpetuate hurting ourselves or hurting another is considered to be an expression both of great power and great compassion.[...]

There is no way to lash out at someone physically or verbally, to belittle their achievements, to exploit them in some way, to consider them unworthy of hearing the truth, and emerge undamaged ourselves. We are capable of so much more, and we dishonor that potential when we don’t live with integrity.

–Sharon Salzberg [passage picked from Awakin. Creative comic above by Dharma Comics ;-)]]