Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

to creatively assume the mountaintop from the way another person might experience it. The mountaintop experience is the place of peace — in the profoundest of senses — and grace could easily be described as seeking peace, balance and harmony. Could we wish for others to be at peace with the world, for instance? Could we seek peace in our own hearts and give up conflict with others and conflict in our own heads? It is especially helpful, I think, to consider all of our fellow human beings being in that place of peace — on the mountaintop. This is more that just a fancy way to describe our being compassionate to others. It is to sit on the mountaintop as often as we can and to sit on the mountain with others. Everyone else, after all, is potentially sitting on that mountain, seeing the universe as we see it from that perspective. This is our shared, common ground, the common ground of interbeing, empathy and compassion.

The mountaintop experience is joy in the most profound sense. Joy is not something we reach by trying. Like the mountaintop, it can arrive unannounced and for no obvious reason. But a search for peace and a contemplation of the most profound things in life — this, I think, is a recipe for joy in its profoundest sense.

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As a conclusion to this chapter and section, I just want to dig a little deeper into some of the paradoxes which we face — the kind of paradoxes that we seem invited to contemplate, if we are to take the mountaintop experience as a genuine guide to how we ought to be seeing

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