You have to be Self-absorbed to be selfless. You have to turn within and ask “Who am I?” through contemplation and meditation, again and again, before—or while, really—you look outward. Can you trust your instincts to guide you in discriminating between right and wrong without knowing who you are and who you are not? Can you act with real compassion, arising effortlessly and automatically, if you haven’t looked deep inside?—if you haven't begun to clearly see what the most basic parts of you are, those parts that are so fundamental they must be common all? I don’t see how you can when you’re locked behind a door, not really knowing how to get out, much less what’s on the other side. You clearly have to seek the key first.
Self-knowledge is the key, and meditation is the turning of the key in the mechanism. The door opens, and then you can see what’s outside, instead of just blindly imagining what’s there. When you see what’s there, you don’t have to fear and guess and stress so much. You can start to trust your instincts—trust that your actions and reactions will spontaneously be the right ones—even learning when you can’t trust your immediate instinct and when you need to step back and evaluate a situation before saying or doing something. So I don’t see how you can separate inward and outward journeys. If you try to separate them, you won't get anywhere or, worse yet, you might go the wrong way entirely.
You have to fight for compassion within yourself, in a sense, to draw it out from you, then let that compassion flow from you into the world. You have to keep asking yourself who you really are—and you have to mediate—since that’s how you go the deepest inside of yourself to figure these things out. Then you see more and more that the division between you and the world is insubstantial; and the sense of connection between you and others will grow into feelings of both inner ease and outer harmony. Doing the right thing—for yourself and others at the same time—will just become natural and effortless.
— Gabriel Fenteany, January 27, 2016
Image: Atnajökull Ice Cap, Iceland by photographer Orvar Atli
