By Dr. Michael Fayne

As we march into this new year, I find myself searching with ever-greater urgency for some sense of solid psychic ground on which to stand. But the more I search, the more I feel that this psychic shelter does not exist, or rather, perhaps I am looking for the wrong thing. I cannot find solace or reassurance that all will be well, but what I have found are many voices, some quite recent, from the world’s spiritual traditions. These voices use different metaphors and terms, but they all convey a similar message pointing toward the deepest truth and the path forward. Here are just a few.

There is the voice of Lama Anagarika Govinda, a European man in the mid-20th century who became a student, a scholar, and finally an influential teacher of Tibetan Buddhism: “Unselfish love and compassion towards all living beings is the first prerequisite of meditation….To gain this attitude one should look upon all beings as upon one’s own mother or one’s own children, since there is not a single being in the universe that in the infinity of time has not been closely related to us in one way or another.”

Then we have the voice of Fr. Thomas Merton, a prominent Christian author who in his later years became a passionate proponent of Christian-Buddhist dialogue, expressing an overwhelming insight he had while standing in the middle of a crowded street: “I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts. I saw where neither desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the Divine. If only they could all see themselves as they really are! If only we could see each other that way all the time! There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

Then there is the voice of Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Sufi teacher in the mid-20th century: “… The third way of realizing the Sufi principle is to recognize in one’s own feeling the feeling of God – that is, to recognize every impulse of love that arises in one’s heart as a direction from God, to realize that that love is a divine spark in one’s heart, and to blow upon that spark until a flame may rise to illuminate the path of one’s life.”

And finally, there are these words from the Talmud: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now, Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

When we hold even such tiny bits of wisdom from these divergent traditions alongside one another, we hold something far greater than the sum of the parts. The traditions say that everyone, everywhere, who has ever lived, is sacred. There are no exceptions to this truth. The traditions say: There are no separations, no “others,” no “me,” no “you,” no “them.” The world’s grief confronts us with a responsibility that is overwhelming yet sacred, and therefore a gift. Our path to peace, salvation, truth, and enlightenment, however we conceptualize it, lies in our daily readiness to “blow upon that spark” of these realizations, and then live accordingly in whatever ways we can.

May all beings draw nearer to Buddha’s wisdom in this coming year.