(Listen to the audio version below)
Stop whatever you’re doing. Look up. Look out.
No – don’t look back down yet. Don’t let your gaze go meandering into the universe within you. Don’t let your mind pull you away with its wonder of what you looking up and out looks like. Just give yourself to someone, anyone outside of you. Fix your loving attention on them for a moment, maybe longer, and offer the gift of your bottomless well of generosity.
The Selfie Age
In this time when it’s common to see a person stop everything they’re doing when they find the perfect light for a selfie, it can be hard to understand the holy place that generosity – meaning liberal, willing giving – occupies.
But don’t blame the selfies for our stinginess. Even though social media is a grotesque and beautiful beast, it’s not to blame for a problem whose roots stem from as far back as Narcissus. We’ll always find a shiny object to mirror our reflection, but in a time when more and more of us are falling into a black hole of internet-fueled comparison, the wisdom of generosity is a balm we can amply apply.
Giving to Get
Before I explain what this wisdom entails, let me decouple the association between generosity and giving time or money.
Too often, giving time or money are acts for personal benefit. They are a pat on one’s back, or another Instagram post in the making. While there can be a benefit to writing a check or spending an afternoon at a soup kitchen, if the motivation is for the benefactor’s gain, it’s not generosity, but the opposite.
The wisdom of generosity is more an attitude than an action. It’s a leaning forward in anticipation of another’s greatness, a move that shuts out all sounds except for their voice and sweeps all visuals from the field except for their form.
And if you get really good, a generous gaze will cause all thoughts about anything but what you’re giving yourself over to to cease immediately.
Ego Tripping
That part – where all thoughts cease – is a goal in many spiritual paths. In order to find it, most spiritual teachers will point you first toward an inner gaze, as in meditation, body awareness, or noticing your thoughts. These are useful tools, but too much time on the inside can trigger the ego, and not always in the way you think.
This ego game isn’t just played with an inflated sense of self-worth. Sure, an ego tripper can be a boaster, a show-off, a loud mouth. But it just as commonly appears as the opposite.
That’s right – low self-esteem and self-loathing are signs of ego dominance. Hyper fixation on feeling bad about ourselves, just like when we feel above others, is a mistaken belief that our individual experience is the stable truth. And that mistaken identity is the telltale heart of the ego.
The ego is not entirely wrong – the individual experience matters, but there is a greater whole that we are each part of. The only thing that can make the ego remember its right place is a generous gaze.
What Is
A generous gaze is one that allows you to gleefully exist as one tiny atom in a speck of dust floating through the universe. It is a genuine enthusiasm for another’s delight. It is the magic that happens when you replace all consideration for your individual wishes with an eagerness to embrace what is in someone else’s experience.
Even if what is in their experience is not necessarily what you want.
Even if what is in their experience seems senseless.
Even if what is in their experience feels unnecessary.
It is what it is, and it is perfect within them.
Fewer, Deeper
In presenting the wisdom of generosity, it’s important to distinguish two things about how and where you place your gaze.
First, there’s a difference between looking at all the beautiful things versus one thing at a time. Scattered attention is not generous, but greedy.
This isn’t to say that you must make your generosity exclusive. Play the field, but remember that you’re more likely to catch the ball if there are fewer points of distraction.
Second, being generous does not absolve you of the need to receive generosity. Instead, the invitation is to learn to move from a state of receiving another’s generous gaze to offering it without any of the strings that are too easily dangled.
In creating a flexibility between the two, we shift from “I” to “you” seamlessly and gracefully, disrobing the ego’s assertions that the individual is greater than the whole and that equally damaging uncooked spiritual belief that the individual is less than the whole.
A Holy Embrace
As you set your gaze on someone, hear this truth: humans are contradictory. Our actions make little sense because our desires don’t follow direct paths. But trace your finger along this mess of squiggly lines and you’ll eventually find a cup filled with holy elixir – the spark between two atoms floating through a speck of dust in the universe as they’re locked in a deep embrace.
It’s a beautiful experience, but you can’t get there if you’re all wrapped up in yourself. You must be deliberate about cultivating curiosity for that beautiful window alongside your looking glass. You must allow yourself to wonder what’s out there, how the wind is different from the stable air inside. You must be willing to step out into it and give yourself over completely.
Because there’s a reason there’s more in this wide, wild world than you and your experience.
