Escaping Samsara

An Ant-Sized Bit of Compassion

I stood on the shore of the Chandra Tal lake last year, nestled high above the peaks in the inner realms of the Himalayan mountain, over 14,000 ft above sea level. On a cloudless night, one could see the Milky Way reflected on it.

All around me, snow-capped giants hold the sky up. I felt small and insignificant surrounded by the still-growing protrusions made from the earth’s folds, formed from the Indian tectonic plate assailing the Asian plate. You no longer look down on the earth; it is no longer the ground beneath your feet, the earth envelops you, it is above you, you are on the shoulders of giants.

A lot of how I think about the Universe and my attempts to make sense of it revolve around the relativism of size. The insignificance that the mountains inspire in me, far removed from socio-cultural landscapes that centre the human, is essential to our worldview. As human beings, we always seek control: control of our own selves, the direction of our lives, of nature, our bodies, to some extent, of other people. It often feels refreshing to let this go for a while and marvel at the sight of things grander than us.

I feel like an ant.

I could crush an ant the way these mountains could crush me into oblivion. The mountains loom over me like gods. We have all crushed insects in our lives; perhaps it makes us feel powerful. The control we have as humans over other organisms makes us feel less clueless. I feel immortal compared to the lifespan of an ant.

Perhaps, in the dark of the night, an ant could witness the entirety of the Milky Way reflected in the water of the Chandra Tal. A falling rock the size of my fist crushes the ant to its death. In that moment, the ant is moved by a sense of compassion for the Milky Way, for all those millions of stars, infinitely larger than the ant, are all set to meet the same fate. They will all be crushed by time and thrown into oblivion. I have learned this lesson, the ant thinks. It will take the Milky Way far longer to meet the same fate and learn of its own insignificance.

But at the end of it all, the ant-sized but of compassion is all that is left.

We can place ourselves somewhere on the scale between the ant and the Milky Way. Maybe we could also feel compassion for the stars, the galaxies, the mountains, for they, too, are on the journey of existence, somewhere on the continuum of the ceaseless cycle of transformations. There are always larger things in the world whose weight could crush them and extinguish their light.

May the realization that everything will pass into nonexistence be the point where our compassion begins. May the fact that nothing has an integral meaning be the reason we feel kinder towards ourselves and others. We are all in this together. At some point, the illusion of our duality will fall apart. Till then, let us aspire to expand our sense of self. We have no existence separate from the world that contains us.