Short answer: Never. Pure Love is Godlight. It can’t lose. In all cases It is all there really is and It shines in perfect joyfully kind and playfully/creatively intelligent always without fail.
Pure Love may take the infinite sufferings of these infinite worlds upon itself, but that’s no more sacrifice than a parent smiling gently down to a child screaming over a skinned knee, swinging the child up and around into a quick embrace, and comforting with patient “shoo, it’s OK, it’s OK, I know, I know, it’s OK” as the happy sunlight laughs uproariously along with the pleasant picnic scene as a family in the green park by the glinting, swift-flitting stream.
Pure Love is not put out by us and our failings. Not for one moment. Pure Love is infinitely powerful and wise. There’s nothing we can do to discourage it.
Ask a boring question; get a boring answer.
But what about this one: When does the wise person self-sacrifice?
Short answer: only when it is within their power to do so in a way that is actually helpful.
When the decision for a serious self-sacrifice takes place within most any human conscious space, at least a touch of swelling vaunt colors that grandiose panorama that is insight into the Truth of Kindness. The less wise a particular conscious space, the more the panorama is co-opted by vaunt–the more the insight into the interconnectedness of all things is perverted into statues, applause, parades to oneself. Convincing oneself of one’s own martyrdom is a type of suicide: you needlessly toss your resources, health, even life away while justifying the act with a heroic story about how you are doing what xzy eternal value demands you do. You fool yourself about what is helpful; to some degree it may be an honest mistake, but a truly wise conscious moment has no interest in heroic autobiographies and so doesn’t make such mistakes: there is clearly something of a dishonest mistake within your inaccurate assessment of how to help. Wisdom lacks ego-trip, and so there’s no internal narrative–neither in desperate words nor in swelling emotions–about how you are the hero.
What does wisdom prefer? Wisdom prefers shared joy, win-win, creating and improving structures and shared resources. Wisdom does not seek suffering–either for itself or others. It seeks aware joyful kind wise individual and collective creation, exploration, and living, just plain joy at life. Wisdom does not abandon sufferers. It does not sneak off to Shangri-La with a retinue of beautiful, healthy, wise, and interesting artists and intellectuals. Wisdom knows that we are all in this together. The wise person must help everyone as best they can, because human wisdom is coordinating one’s ideas and feelings well with the Light within, and the Light within is Pure Love, which is all there really is and whose nature is infinite compassion and joy, and which therefore can no more stop lifting everyone up than a drop of liquid water can stop being wet. The nuance here is “as best they can”.
Wisdom is the whole thing: knowledge of what is really going on, love of what is right and good and holy, insight into moving the current situation more towards Beauty = Truth = Goodness = Justice, but Most of All Love, and the determination and skill required to make as much progress in that effort as their current situation allows. A wise politician within a less corrupt government has more ability to do good than a wise politician within a more corrupt one; so it is in everyone’s best interest to try to reduce corruption within the world.
Corruption is the state of affairs contrary to wisdom. More wisdom in a conscious space is when the ideas and feelings within that conscious space are more willing and able to perceive, understand, follow and live-out the Light shining through each conscious moment. When are ideas and feelings more able to know and follow the Light within? When they are less corrupted by the nonsense of vanity, greed, delusion, cruelty, anger, etc. The Light is Love and the Light shows us how to better in and through Love. So wisdom is a self-enforcing cycle: with more Light we learn better to open up more to the Light, to arrange our thoughts, feelings, words, deeds, and lives in ways more and more conducive to understanding, following, and living the Truth.
More wisdom in a community is when wise ideas and feelings are heeded more than foolish ones. More wisdom in an institution (business, government, etc) is when wise ideas and feelings create and evolve the rules, structures, and systems more than foolish ones do. Corruption in such public works is the state of affairs contrary to wisdom, the state of affairs that heeds, celebrates, condones, justifies, follows, allows for, and otherwise rewards greed, selfishness, meanness, cruelty, laziness, insecurity, vanity, and all such distractions with power, respect, security, pleasure, happiness, contentment and other earthly goods, not bad within themselves, but also not good within themselves, since everything is good or bad only to the degree it partakes of Loving Kindness and the concomitant Joyfully Selfless Laughter.
Wisdom cannot be formalized. You cannot create a foolproof system for translating the Light prior to all ideas and feelings into human words and deeds, codes, laws, institutions, or bodies. However, you can agree to agree on universally obvious spiritual values like: awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competence, and we’re all in this together oh but for real and that means all must be not just respected and helped but loved and accepted; and use that agreement as a shared foundation for creating, evolving, maintaining and executing shared endeavors.
Yeah, but everyone nods along with such sentiments, and then heads off to feed their faces, rub their private parts, exchange back-scratch-congrats with their friends, brag about their kids, swill their brew, and otherwise let everything fall into disarray. And then, in the ruins or perceived ruins, they get worked up, indignant, radical and ready to steal and maim in the name of Love, wisdom, and other virtues.
Fuck! Damn!
Plus we’ve lost track of the essay’s original intent: when does the wise person self-sacrifice? Well, the wise person tries to actually make things better!! They work on improving themselves and the systems within which they live as best they can. There is no perfect formula for this, but there is a general outline that we all know: work every day to think, feel, speak, and act with more awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competency, and kindness; aka: love the Light with all your heart and soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself. Wisdom works to make things better for itself, not for greed, anger, desperation, cruelty, vanity. Wisdom works to create systems with less corruption and with more shared creative win-win joy. Human wisdom tries to preserve itself and the vessels that carry Light into the world, so it doesn’t want to kill wise people or even make them sick or broke. Human wisdom looks and looks and looks for ways to spread peaceful insight, joyful resolution, all-inclusive and -uplifting community: first within one’s own conscious space and then beyond. Human wisdom looks so hard, it works so hard for effortless beauty. God’s Wisdom is effortless Beauty = Truth = Goodness = Justice, but really just Pure Relentless Intelligent Creative Joyful Love. Human wisdom has to keep trying and trying again to better and better sync up with God’s wisdom, to free itself more and more from the corruptions of anger, resentment, greed, pride, delusion–anything that would narrow the ever-expanding tunnel into thinking, feeling and living Pure Love (this tunnel is awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competency, compassion, loving kindness, joy … ).
Author: Idees McBees
Editorial Team: BW, AW; Copyright: AMW
Our first book, “Love at a Reasonable Price Volume 1: First Loves” will be available Spring 2017 at From-Bartleby.com.
We sell greeting cards, T-shirts, & etc (mostly riffs on Pure Love and Something Deeperism) at PL Industries (Zazzle Store)