Journal Reflection, Reaction Paper Example

The question in this section asked the reader to think of a person who showed compassion at an earlier time in life, and to meditate on the status of relationship to this individual. I interpreted the point of the exercise as an attempt to re-live the effects of a positive relationship. My own personal choice was that of my grandfather, who had always been kind to me from a young age. The compassion he demonstrated towards me, I always felt, was that of a certain conditionless love: he seemed to want me to be happy at any cost, while at the same time, I received the feeling that he was somehow content just by having me around. Certainly, a scientific explanation of this relationship would be generations could be reduced to causal explanations, such as DNA merely being happy to see that it has re-produced two or three generations down the line: but I think that scientific explanations fail to explain this kind of relationship. This is what came to my mind and moreover, my heart as I performed the exercise in question: there existed a certain love this relationship that seems to transcend our commonly accepted ideologies about science. What such relationship reveal, when we really reflect upon them like I did when performing this exercise, is that there are interactions between human beings and, in general, living things that seem to transcend the very boundaries of our everyday life. By this I mean they transcend what we commonly think or are told constitutes personal existence.

An exercise such as this makes one really push the boundaries of our individual experience: by visualizing my grandfather, as the task states, I began to think about this very compassion demonstrated to me: it was something that almost borders on the unexplainable. There is a certain tension between explanations, placed in words, and feelings such as emotions, which when these emotions are especially powerful, all our words seem inadequate. This is precisely the feeling I got when taking the time to think about this particular relationship: I didn’t start to think about reasons why my grandfather showed such compassion to me, but rather in a way, I felt totally immanent to this relationship itself, as though there was nothing else beyond it.

In other words, the relationship itself became what was important: not why such compassion was demonstrated, not even who was involved in this situation: Although my grandfather certainly became a symbol of this compassion when I thought about our relationship in these terms.

At the same time, by conceiving of this situation I felt like I had stepped out of my current living space. Current worries about school, work and personal relationships are certainly pertinent problems that I face, just like anyone else: but in a certain sense, by thinking about the relationship between my grandfather and I, within the context of compassion that was natural to this relationship, it was though as some higher level of truth emerged in contrast to these worries.

In other words, these worries themselves appear to be almost transient in contrast to the emotive power of a relationship based entirely on compassion, of an unconditioned love that one human being conveys to another, without any type of stipulation or precondition: the majority of our relationships do not bear this kind of character. And when I thought about this contrast between relationships, between the compassionate relationship and the relationship of everyday problems, it is the latter that suddenly seems dwarfed, and even insignificant.

A relationship constituted entirely by compassion signifies something almost eternal, another emotional level; it helps, so to speak, to put things in order, so that we recognize trivial incidents as what they are: trivial.

This exercise called for two types of meditation, based on eating and walking. In the case of the latter, the basic intent was to go for a stroll, however without any clear purpose; instead we are instructed to think about the experience itself. In the case of the former, the objective is much the same, as when eating food we are to attempt to focus on the experience itself: tastes, smells, and other sensory perceptions, combined with the emotions that the experience of eating conjures up in us.

When I went for a walk in accordance with the instructions, I was at the outset slightly confused. Normally, I only take a stroll with a clear intent in mind: to reach a particular destination. In other words, the walk itself is only secondary: it merely means to get to a certain end. The walk itself is never the goal, the experience of the movement of the body is not the aim. This aforementioned sense of confusion arose in me precisely because of this radical change in perspectives: my first question to myself was, “where should I go for a walk?”

Of course, eliminating such a question, or rather, placing it as secondary, was the entire goal of the exercise, as I came to realize. I decided merely to go forward, preferably to a place without many people, so that I could more deeply commit myself to the task at hand: I didn’t have any necessary goal, but rather tried to block out distractions so that the walking itself would become the focus of my reflections and meditations.

Paying such attention the act of exercise itself was almost a jarring experience: there are unconscious gestures that we never think about, such as breathing, the sound of one’s feet striking the ground, the movement of the air against one’s auditory canals. And this is exactly the point: the unconscious rises in our consciousness, as we begin to think about all the minute details that comprise existence: we begin to feel that what is important, or told to us is important, perhaps is not. The feeling when this unconscious rises to the conscious level is one in which a change in priorities occurs: perhaps the world is not, I felt, what they say it is?

Much of the same thoughts occurred to me when I performed the eating meditation. Food is often once again merely something that needs to be done, it is not an end in itself: this is the fast food culture we live in that is a reflection of this position.

When performing the eating meditation, I almost felt like I had traveled back in time, when eating and the gathering of close persons was almost a ritual experience. I felt my body performing the gestures of eating, as I really thought about them; at the same time, the food that I ate almost came alive, or bore the sense of something that was living, life nourishing life, as the law of nature itself has laid out for us.

The breathing combined with the ingestion of the food created an almost surreal feeling, as I became much more attentive of my body and the act of eating. This mundane experience gained an entirely different importance, just by thinking about the experience itself: the requirement to thank those who brought the food to me further underlined this point, as what seems like a trivial experience, suddenly became more important. How much work and labor is ultimately required to provide the food to me? This is something that is forgotten in our consumerist culture, where everything is available for the exchange of money, while working for something is almost an alienated experience. What I am trying to say is that we have become alienated from our own basic experience; a symptom of this alienation is that we cannot enjoy certain experiences, such as walking or eating, for themselves.