When providing medical care to someone, it is extremely important to have an idea of that person's "baseline" so you can appreciate changes to their physical or mental status. Our baselines change throughout our lives but if we look carefully we can notice a fairly permanent, low-grade suffering that operates in the background like an invincible app, draining our battery. If you go searching for it, which I wholeheartedly recommend, you may find the pervasive suffering too subtle, in which case I would recommend starting with the suffering of change: we suffer when we meet with undesirable circumstances and we suffer when parting with the desired. This comprises the backbone of our daily life (symbolized by the dotted line...I'll explain a little later): we miss our bus, we get a flat tire, our friend moves away, etc. And how do we, as technologically advanced human beings, handle this? Diversion! We pick up the phone, turn on the TV, and surf the fake news pipeline. Being something of a cartophile, I've made a map of our actual path through life (the bolder, black line) as a series of evasions of the dreadful dotted line, from which we hastily retreat if we get too close. Our lives then become synonymous with our escape routes and we think of that as normal, so much so that the line of evasion becomes our new baseline.
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| Obviously, visual art is not my specialty. For real art, go to https://asheralon.deviantart.com/ or your local art museum |
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According to the
Karmapa , compassion is the default human condition. I had a difficult time with that concept, especially having just listened to
Marina Abramovic's TED Talk in which she described what it was like to perform
Rhythm 0, a work of performance art in which she stood for six hours beside a table with seventy-two objects and a note of instruction to the audience to use the objects on her in any way they desired. Compassion may seem elusive and certainly not our baseline but it logically follows that it should be because of the nature of our shared baseline: suffering. It is easy to gather observational evidence that suffering is endemic to the human condition; turn on the TV and computer and if you are not affected by the varied afflictions of others then introspectively look into why you turned on those devices in the first place and see if you can locate your dotted line, buried under that soothing cacophony. As long as we can be receptive to empathy, compassion can and empirically should be our default condition. It makes the delineation of "self" and "other" very fuzzy.
People who wouldn't probably characterize themselves as violent took full advantage of Marina Abramovic's invitation in
Rhythm 0, to dehumanizing effect. Objectification desensitizes otherwise rational human beings and allows for the stratification of "self" and "other" which can be overcome by seeing the overlap of our dotted lines, in which case we would not be able to differentiate them at all.
