Universal Tender Heart and Universal Responsibility

As human beings, we share in common our universal tender heart. We may think of ourselves as separate from others, and others may think of themselves as separate from us. Yet we are all equal.

Every movement and response we make comes from our tender heart. This capacity to respond has no beginning and no end; it is ongoing, from the moment we wake until the time we sleep. For brief periods when we are sleeping deeply, perhaps there is nothing to witness or respond to from our universal tender heart. But then, as we dream, we are responding continuously. All beings are continuously responding to their universal tender heart. We may think of ourselves as separate from others, and others may think of themselves as separate from us. Yet we are all equal in that we need to respond to our universal tender heart all the time, minute by minute, second by second.

We observe our own mind reacting, or often not responding, to our universal tender heart. In both cases, there is a process of change toward a need, whatever that need may be. Sometimes we perceive that this process can seem confused, imprecise, and mechanical. We are simply acting habitually. Yet when we observe carefully and watch attentively, looking beneath the surface, we see how our mind and our being are always responding to the universal tender heart in the context of what is happening in any given moment, and therefore we become very alive. It becomes very clear how our lives and our entire existence is not merely an inanimate mechanical production, but is very, very tender. The more we become aware of how our universal tender heart is always present in our mind, the more we experience that our world is suffused with so much feeling of this tender heart, along with tenderness toward our own being.

We witness that our world is governed by response to universal needs at a very basic level, and that we are all creatures responding to our own tender heart and its needs. This has nothing to do with the person's ego.

Yet although the universal tender heart is always present, there can be unconsciousness of how we are not so different from one another, not different at all. In fact, everyone is in the same boat. Everyone is in the same place we are. When we are fully conscious of this similarity, that is sanity. When we forget this, when our mind is not aware and more intentionally ignores this fact that self and others are all equal, that is what we would call insanity. This active ignorance becomes an unacceptable attitude or approach to life when we take it even further and are not only unconscious, ignoring and denying that we and all others are equal, but at the expense of others, we try to build our own comfortable world around fulfilling our needs. That is the beginning of insanity.

We can end up being very sensitive to ourselves and our loved ones, yet very cruel to others. Like a mother tiger that may pounce on a vulnerable, defenseless deer that is merely grazing on the plain to get a mouthful of grass to eat, posing no threat or harm to anyone. Then in that same moment, the tiger can turn to her own cubs and lick them with a very loving mind and heart. This kind of dichotomy is the beginning of insanity: when you have one way toward others and another way toward yourself; one way for you and immediately after, different for others. When self-love has become too great and obscures our universal tender heart, beyond need, beyond common needs; when someone has become a predator to others, all of these are aspects of what we can call insanity.

When our life looks different on the outside from our life on the inside, when it does not match and we do not even remotely recognize ourselves and others as equal, we can say with certainty that we are in the prison of our bubbles of unconsciousness, with an unbalanced mind, with denial. From this state, we push our own interests onto others. When the mind is unbalanced and unconscious in this way, we tend to overlook the fact that a universal tender heart is omnipresent and keep moving forward toward our next conquest.

How could someone be happy living this way, with this ignorance of what is so obvious around us? So we have to make a choice: do we want to appear happy being ignorant of our similarity with others and pushing only our own priorities? Or do we want to be apparently unhappy, in terms of happiness measured and judged through the lens of the eight worldly concerns*, yet wise, sensible, and satisfied with our own modest, awake, and wise intelligence that guides us toward sanity in all our life?

To achieve this, what we need is to be in contact with our universal heart and accept ourselves and others as equal, looking at how we observe and respond to this, how others are responding to this in their own lives, and how we and others are truly identical, without gaps of any kind. If there is a gap, we recognize that the difference is more or less based on our projections. We also recognize frankly that when we move away from the universality of our tender heart, suffering is generated and seeds are sown of suffering that will later ripen in our mind.

So what do we do? We return to developing sensitivity to our genuine good heart, the genuine tender heart, the genuine committed discipline of not causing harm based on the integrity of our own tender heart and our deep understanding of how we respond, and of how we and others are all equal. Observing this continuously, it becomes very clear to us that causing any harm to others to satisfy our ego is insane. We understand that any justification of reasons for bringing others to suffer in the name of status, fame, power, wealth, and so on, cannot be a source of happiness.

When we begin to generate some awareness of our universal tender heart, but still cannot extend it to others, my advice is: at least try to remain humble. Aspire to stay within the bounds of not consciously ignoring the fact that we are all in the same boat and wearing the same shoes, and instead notice that our tender and universal heart is always, moment by moment, second by second, trying to call us. And aspire to respond to its call.

Originally published at Mangala Shri Bhuti