An Eternal Law

According to social exchange theory, you continue in a relationship because the rewards for maintaining the relationship are more than the costs. I first met this theory through the work of two social psychologists named John Thibaut and Harold Kelley. They weren’t the originators of the idea, but they did much to advance it as a tool for understanding relationships.

The idea that human relationships are driven by a more or less unconscious process of cost versus benefit analysis seemed to me at first to be a grim and pessimistic view of human nature. What about people like Mother Teresa? Are they motivated primarily by concerns of “What’s in it for me”? What about philanthropists? Are they motivated by selfish needs to impress others by their goodness? Or by needs for a tax write off?  Does no one do anything or maintain any relationship simply because they love someone else?

I remember a neighbor of mine in New Orleans who fed cats. She always had 20 or 30 lounging around in her yard and on her porch. Some neighbors had complained about it.  “I guess you wonder too why I do it," she told me. She continued on to say she believed when she stands before the Pearly Gates, St. Peter is not going to say no to someone who has been kind to God’s little creatures.  I didn’t really believe it. I believed she was motivated by love. But  she felt that would not be understood by most people, so she offered the kind of reason she thought they would believe . Her estimate of human nature appeared to be quite low.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come also to accept the idea that most if not all behavior is motivated by selfish concerns. But I have come to see that some people have a much larger sense of self than others. I think of the word self as referring to the sphere of our concern: the sphere that contains everyone we care about, everything that is important to us, everything that matters. If our sphere of concern is very small, people say we are very selfish. If our sphere of concern is very large, people say we are kind and considerate of the needs of others.

But what if our sphere of concern becomes so large that no one and nothing is excluded? At that point the difference between self and other disappears and concepts such as self, no-self, selfish and selfless have no meaning. There's a verse in chapter 10 of the Diamond Sutra that is variously translated, but which I think is about this issue. My favorite translation/paraphrase goes something like this: "The Buddha said to Subhuti, "What would you think of a person whose sense of self is larger than Mount Meru [the legendary foundation for all worlds]? Would you say such a large self is great?" Subhuti answered, "Yes, Blessed One, such a large self would be great because the Buddha has taught us that such a great self is the same as no self."

In those moments of true love, those moments in which we become aware of our connection to everyone and all that is, we transcend the distinction between self and other. We feel we are part of  one Great Self (or Non-Self) that is all-inclusive. I doubt that anyone lives for very long in that state of awareness. But I think many people have a glimpse of it from time to time. And I think that for all of us, it is our ultimate home. And the more often we visit that state of all-encompassing love, the happier we will be in this very selfish and cruel world. That may seem like a contradiction, an impossibility. But I think it is a fact. “Hate,” the Buddha said, “is not overcome by hate. Hate is overcome by love. This is an eternal law.”  (Dhammapada, v. 5)