Mercy

The quality of mercy is something that I've been meditating on for quite some time.

Over this last week, I've given myself many, many moments to take time to really chew on this concept.

Because the question surrounding the concept of mercy, it's interesting [that] the same rhetoric surrounding mercy now is the same as when I was a meditation teacher. The question of if one gives mercy, it enables those who abuse to continue.

And I don't think that that is incorrect when you think of mercy as an emotional quality.

However, when one begins to think of “perspective as reality and perception as reality” , in the larger connotation in which rhetoric, your own language, can betray you. Using mercy as an emotional baseline can reveal that you are always and or have been the victim and shows the pattern of you becoming a victim of injustice instead of perceiving it as a capacity to give mercy. And that is a larger conversation to have about healing.

One's own internal emotional life, and how perception and perspective can shape reality.

However, what I want to hopefully touch upon, which is in my meditation over this last week, thinking about previous students [and] current conversations regarding it. If you hold mercy as a power, then I believe the conversation changes in regards to how do we fight in this world or combat that which is cruel, greedy, unjust, envious, petty, prideful, jealous, the vices.

How do we fight these vices…And is it with virtue.

When you use mercy as a power, it shines a light on those who do not have it within them.

That's how cruelty and the ugliness can escape and elude in this world because it's not that people do it; it's that they do not want to be seen doing it.

So when you're at a coffee shop and you see a poor barista drowning in tickets. You, holding the power to say, “I can wait”, “I've got time”, shines a light on those who cannot.

If you use mercy, it truly shines a light on those who practice injustice, cruelty, and all of the vices that we now, more than ever, are trying to find a way to combat.

And so that's what I've been meditating on. Clearly still have not landed…but meditating.