How much do we Care?

I am currently in the middle of revising a seminar called “Leading by Example” that I will be conducting in New York City. The seminar will be a call to arms for all who can help lead humanity to a higher level of consciousness…and that most likely includes you if you found your way to reading this blog entry.

 I am putting together some video clips to use as the basis for discussion during the seminar that have been taken from a talk on the topic of soul development that Andrew Cohen gave on the retreat he just completed a couple of weeks ago in Italy. (See my previous blog posts for more on that retreat) Andrew himself has just posted his own blog entry based on that teaching…click here to read it.

 One of the first questions that I intend to go into will be “What does it mean to care?” Soul development as Andrew uses the term means moral development, which means a development toward a higher capacity for and willingness to care. But what does it mean to care and how can we measure the degree to which we care?” I have been thinking about it and it seems to me that the measure of care depends on two elements. The first has to do with the intensity of care. That would relate to how intensely a person’s feeling of care is and I believe that can only be measured in observation of a persons actions in relationship to that which is cared for.

 As an example if two people see a child screaming from the window of a burning house and one risks their own life and runs in to get the child, you would say that person cared more. You can of course think of endless examples like this and what they all point to is that the degree to which someone is willing to sacrifice in action for another is a measure of how much they care.

 But there seems to be another element to the measure of care that has to do with the nature of what it is that is being cared for. Mother Theresa cared for all of the starving children in India and she is universally recognized as an extraordinarily caring human being. That is because she sacrificed her whole life to taking care of the poor and destitute. Now to use an extreme example, Adolph Hitler devoted his whole life to winning global supremacy for the Aryan race. Both cared passionately about something…one could argue equally passionately. The difference is that most people would agree that the care of Mother Theresa was greater, or more evolved than that of Hitler. If Hitler were to have changed his mind half way through World War II and decided to use the might of Germany to create piece in Europe most would say he had taken a moral leap forward.

 It seems that the intensity of the feeling experience with which we care is only one dimension of what it means to care. In the teaching I referred to that Andrew Cohen gave on his last retreat he spoke very directly to the enormous challenge he faces in attempting to get people to care more about the process of evolution than they do about the personal fears and concerns of the ego.

 In the seminar that I am preparing for New York I want to go into this slowly and with…care… I intend to use long periods of discussion in small groups so that everyone present can go very deeply into these matters and discover something for themselves that they may never have see before.